I might post more pics of what comes out of his shop sometime, including his Damascus steel and "railroad-spike" knives.
But what he'll forever be best known for, at least to people of my generation, will be playing Ralphie's dad in 1983's A Christmas Story...
And Kolchak was a pretty darned good character too!
Well, what can be said that hasn't been said already. The man was a comic genius. And even though Knotts was from West Virginia, his character of Deputy Barney Fife from The Andy Griffith Show will always be one of North Carolina's favorite sons.One of the best roles he had was this really nervous corporal in No Time for Sergeants (in which he appeared with future co-star Andy Griffith). It was like an early prototype character of Barney Fife. He also did quite a few movies for Disney and later on appeared for a few seasons on Three's Company.
Two things made the last few seasons of The Andy Griffith Show somewhat less stellar than the earlier ones: going from black-and-white to color, and losing Don Knotts after the fifth season. When the producers made the transition to color, it seriously affected the quality of the comedy. It was like they thought that since the show was getting "upgraded" that it should also become more sophisticated and "up-to-date". In the process they forgot that it was Mayberry's timeless charm that made so many people tune in. Of all the episodes that were made, I don't think any of the color ones are in my top ten list of favorites. And all of my favorites have Barney in them.
Because as Barney Fife, Don Knotts was the heart and soul of The Andy Griffith Show. He was the source of so much of the comedy and after he left, the producers tried to "farm out" the place he had to other characters, and it just didn't have the same charisma that Knotts brought to the show. Probably the best episodes that stick out in my mind that feature Barney are "The Loaded Goat" (maybe one of the funniest TV episodes ever), "Barney's Sidecar", and the one about Aunt Bea's pickles, that had Barney stopping every out-of-town car (including one from Nova Scotia) and giving them a free jar of Bea's "kerosene cucumbers". Classic, classic stuff.
Well, I don't know what else to say, but I'll close this post out with a little song from The Andy Griffith Show (sung to the tune of "My Darling Clementine)...
Well, it ain't six ports at all.
It's twenty-two ports.
This makes a lot more sense if you start thinking of America as being post-revolutionary France, with Napoleon Bonaparte running things. Being so overstretched in our "empire" we are now selling off some of our holdings to fund it all, like when France sold the U.S. the Louisiana territory. Sorta makes Iraq our own version of Borodino when you think about it.
Actually, I think Napoleon was a somewhat more honorable man than those in charge over here are. At least he never sold France itself out piecemeal to whatever foreign interests could pay the price. Napoleon certainly wouldn't commit national self-flagellation by signing over control of Bordeaux and Marseilles to a British company.
Y'know, the real reason he came to power in the first place is because all the higher-ranked officers started losing it all from the neck-up on la guillotine. Makes you wonder if this country isn't ripe for some drastic leadership change, and see what talent might have the chance to rise to the occasion.
So what y'all think I should do: maybe create a big graphic banner with Taylor all over it for the top of the screen while AI is running? Gimme some ideas, I won't mind turning this place into a Taylor Shrine :-)
He didn't veto McCain-Feingold, and he does nothing about our borders being flooded with illegals and who-knows-what-else... but he's willing to go on record as saying that he'll finally use veto to open up an American vulnerability to a foreign power.
It makes no sense, but you can read all about it here.
This is so depressing a thing to report that it literally hurts doing so.
Hanging in my Dad's knife-shop is a photo of three men standing together, each smoking a pipe: Dad, legendary knifemaker George Herron, and Bill Moran. It's hung there for a few years now, like a good luck charm: may good fortune smile on Dad's forge as it has on these two gentlemen.
It was through Dad that I knew Bill Moran. When Dad asked me if I wanted to go down to Troy one Sunday to the community college where Moran was teaching a class on blade forging, I immediately said yes. I'll never forget the first time I met him, the way he smiled and had that twinkle in his eye. So help me, Moran had one of the friendliest smiles I've ever seen from anyone. Most of our family came to know him too. He always took time to talk to anyone who was interested in the fine art of knifemaking, and share whatever knowledge and wisdom - and his was considerable - that he happened to have.
So far as American legends go, God broke the mold with Bill Moran. I like to believe that he would have made his mark anyway with his prowess on the anvil. But what he'll forever be remembered for was when in 1973 he made the first Damascus steel blade to be produced in hundreds of years.
Damascus steel is multi-layered steel. You would recognize it immediately if you saw it, with its beautiful patterns and whorls of color. My Dad recently made a Damascus knife that, after the steel had been folded and re-folded, has four-hundred-and-five layers of steel compressed into one thin blade. It was a high artform in the Middle Ages, but over the centuries the secret of how to produce it had been lost. Moran found out how to do it again, and he shared his newfound knowledge with his fellow knifemakers. The result since then has been some of the most beautiful blades to ever be made... and Moran made the best of them.
This was a guy who was good at his trade, and just had a plain good heart to him. And now he's gone. But I believe that Bill is in a far better place now, and has been happily reunited with the wife he loved so dearly. Part of me likes to believe that he's now turning his legendary intellect and skill toward making more knives, with the finest forge that Heaven can provide.
Well, I could go on, but that would just be adding to what a lot of other people have already said about Bill. There's some really good write-ups about him that I've found: The Washington Post and The Frederick News-Post have articles about him, and the News-Post also a special essay about Moran written by friend Pat Jamgochian that expresses who Moran was far better than anything I could do here. Moran was co-founder of the American Bladesmith Society, and it has set up a special memorial page for people's remembrances and photos of Bill. There's also a tribute to him at Never Yet Melted.
Sorry to see him go. The best words that come to my mind about Bill Moran are the same ones that Thomas Jefferson used to describe Benjamin Franklin: "No one can replace him."
EDIT 11:06 PM EST: Cutting Commentary has a collection of links to stories about Bill Moran and more photos of his handiwork.
Now Ron Paul, member of the House of Representatives (and one of the few in government today that I feel is worthy of being addressed as "Honorable") weighs in on this, with very much the same perspective. In "The End of Dollar Hegemony" Rep. Paul outlines the history of the American dollar as a tool for diplomacy and effecting foreign policy over the past century, and how there is now the threat of this being undermined by (a) a long-standing disastrous policy of fiat currency and artifically inflating what value the dollar already had, and (b) the growing disuse of the "petro-dollar" as the currency of international oil markets. A very sober read for anyone who's paying attention to this sort of thing.
He sells milk for half the price you pay. The feds want to stop him. Why?You know, if most of the small-time farmers in this country ever decided to hold a general strike, they would bring not just this nation, but a lot of the rest of the rest of the world to its knees. Just something to think about. Farmers are some of the most looked-down upon people in a society, but they are also the only ones that are really feeding that society either. It would be in our best interests to not throw up obstacles against them, ya know.By Andrew Martin
Tribune national correspondent
Published February 19, 2006YUMA, Ariz. -- Hein Hettinga is a dairy farmer but he doesn't spend his days milking cows.
Rather, Hettinga keeps a cell phone pressed to his ear to keep tabs on his empire of 15 dairy farms stretching from California to west Texas, including five massive farms in the desert east of Yuma.
But what distinguishes Hettinga from other large-scale dairy farmers is that he also bottles the milk from his Arizona farms and trucks it to stores in Arizona and Southern California. At one of them, Sam's Club in Yuma, two gallons of Hettinga's whole milk sell for $3.99.
That's the same price as a single gallon of whole milk in Chicago, which is second only to New Orleans in the cost of milk.
By controlling all stages of production, Hettinga says he can produce milk so efficiently that he and his customers can make a hefty profit at dirt-cheap prices. Such vertical integration, as it is known, is increasingly popular in agriculture as farmers and processors try to find ways to eliminate costs and increase revenues.
In the highly politicized world of dairy, efficiency could carry a price. Major dairy cooperatives and milk processors successfully persuaded federal regulators to write new rules that would prohibit the business practices that Hettinga has so successfully put in place.
Under the proposed regulations, Hettinga could continue to process his own milk only if he agrees to participate in a federally regulated pool of milk revenues, which would essentially require him to pay his competitors to stay in business. A bill that would have a similar effect is working its way through Congress.
Hettinga, an outspoken 64-year-old who emigrated from Holland to California at age 7, said the pending regulations were an effort by dairy heavyweights such as Dean Foods and the Dairy Farmers of America, the nation's largest dairy cooperative, to monopolize the milk business.
"Basically, I'm a pebble in the shoe of DFA and Dean Foods," he said. "The only reason I'm a success is they are a milk monopoly and they have raised the price too high. The consumer is getting ripped off."
Both Dean and the Dairy Farmers of America, or DFA, declined to comment for this article...
But anyhoo, if yer like me, and especially after the way he faced his fate this week on American Idol (playing his harmonica as he walked toward the judges) you probably can't get enough of Taylor Hicks right now. This is the first guy who, if he won on Idol, I would be there to buy his CD on the first day it's out. Yeah I've always liked Clay Aiken and Ruben Studdard, but Hicks just flat-out astounds me with his talent and charm. The music is in this guy, you know what I mean? Well, someone saw my last post about him and sent me a terrific rendition of "Georgia On My Mind" by Hicks, and it's definitely going on my MP3 player now. It's moved me enough that I plan on getting Hicks's first CD, now being sold at an independent music store in Birmingham, Alabama, even though there's currently a two-week wait for shipped orders. Here it is, Taylor Hicks's Under The Radar:
So a little while ago I was feeling pretty hungry, and thought about eating some of the chopped barbecue that we got from Short Sugar's Drive-In in Reidsville, North Carolina today. Yeah, they don't cook their meat all the way through in their wood-fired pit anymore (a lot of it is done in an electrical oven) and some people don't like that, but theirs is still a taste that has been called legendary: it was once voted best barbecue in America, even.
(By the way, Short Sugar's is where we shot the final scene of Forcery. With its old-fashioned drive-through it was the perfect place to re-create Mel's Drive-In from American Graffiti.)
Well anyway I nuked up a plate of Short Sugar's chopped barbecue in the microwave. And I almost used Short Sugar's Barbecue Sauce on it, which is probably one of the strangest barbecue sauces around. I'm pretty sure some of the main ingredients are vinegar and brown sugar (some think soy sauce is in there too), but no tomatoes or any other ingredient you think goes into barbecue sauce. Definitely worth getting two or three bottles of the stuff if you ever visit them. I could have gone with that, but then I decided to try something a little different...
Along with Short Sugar's, Williamson Bros. Bar-B-Q in Marietta, Georgia is one of my all-time favorite barbecue restaurants. Every time we visit Lisa's family there, we always stop at Williamson Bros. to eat and then buy a gallon or two of their world-famous sauce. Williamson Bros. sauce is more of the traditional sort, but its exquisite taste is unparalleled by anything else in its class that's on the market. Well, we've got a little bit left in the gallon jug we bought the last time we were there, and just as an experiment I decided to use the Williamson Bros. sauce on the Short Sugar's chopped barbecue...
...And, it was incredibly delicious! It was like the very best of both places coming together in perfect harmony in my mouth. VERY good combo, although it left me horribly thirsty (I had some tea on hand to wash it down with). Well worth trying out for yourself if (A) you ever come to Reidsville and can get barbecue from Short Sugar's, and (B) you have some Williamson Bros. sauce on hand. You can order the Williamson Bros. sauce from their website at the link above and have it shipped to you, if you live in some remote place like Idaho and can't get down to Georgia on a regular basis. Maybe someday Short Sugar's will start selling their sauce online too: if and when they do I'll make a post about it at once.
Anyhoo, it was really delicious. So delicious in fact that I felt led to make a post about it, for sake of anyone interested in good barbecue. Sometime in the near future I'll also try to do full reviews on both Short Sugar's and Williamson Bros., along with most of the other good barbecue places that I know of.
Here's where Power Line demonstrates considerable narrow-mindedness:
That conservatives (Republicans) are happier than liberals (Democrats) is no coincidence, as anyone who earns a living selecting juries can tell you.Ummmm, the modern Republican party is not conservative. Its party platform is moderate or centrist... and I would even say tilting toward socialist on too many issues.
But I figured out awhile back that Power Line is more interested in ideology that ideas, so their shilling for the Republicans no matter what doesn't really surprise me. Which is a shame because based on what I know about the guys who run Power Line, they're a pretty sharp bunch. Definitely smarter than to let themselves be used as tools by partisans.
(C'mon guys, this is the freakin' Internet... the whole idea of this place is that you don't have to think what "they" want you to think!)
But back to the issue of "happiness", which Pew thinks is relative to one's political stance. Maybe it's worth pointing out that people like these ladies were also happy, even downright jubilant back in the day...
EDIT 1:26 PM EST: I just noticed that North Carolina has four contestants in the top 24... tying with California for state with most singers in this year's competition. The Tarheel crew are: Heather Cox from Jonesville, Bucky Covington from Rockingham, Chris Daughtry from McLeansville, and Kellie Pickler from Albemarle. Throw in the fact that Clay Aiken is from Raleigh and Fantasia Burrino is from High Point and what can ya say: this state really has a set of pipes!
