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sideways handgun research
Saturday, December 17 2011
[REDACTED]
Sarah the vegan arrived with her two friends from the City. They were too tall, thin stylish men, and they were living a life that Rick Perry might make a campaign ad to denounce. For a surprisingly long time after the arrived, we stood around the island in the kitchen talking mostly about the kinds of tropical parasites you definitely do not want to get: Guinea Worms, flies that pupate in lumps in your skin, and brain-eating amœbas. Gretchen proceeded to make two different kind of waffles (blueberry and gingerbread). While that was happening, I took Sarah and the two guys down to the greenhouse so as to give them a tour. We also looked in through the south window of the brownhouse to get a sense of the running water and tiny library I have down there. As we passed the composter drum, I noted that my humanure had the appealing fragrance of extra sharp cheddar cheese.
It came out in our brunch conversation that the quieter of the couple was a welder who actually makes a living selling simple steel tables. He told us that Etsy.com is not a bad way to get started in the fashionable interior design scene.
After brunch, all of us did a tour of the upstairs. Everybody is always wowed by my laboratory (which is relatively tidy these days), but they're wowed in a way that puts looks on their faces that lead me to suspect that they suspect that I might be a little insane in the membrane.
Eventually we all went for a walk at the abandoned buildings Gretchen discovered a couple months ago at the big Dug Hill Road bluestone mine. We've since found out that those buildings had once been a hotel, though it's hard to imagine why anyone would have been drawn to the place unless it also provided gambling and prostitution; it abuts a swamp and it's also possible the ugly bluestone mine predates the hotel.
After our guests had departed, I found myself researching the cliché of the sideways-held pistol (a common trope in Hip Hop videos and Gangsta Cinema). This interest had grown out of a post I'd written the other day on the Lowes Facebook page where they'd tried to explain their pulling support from the TLC show All American Muslim:
I was among the many who voiced my concerns in the 1980s when the Cosby show failed to depict the typical African American family as crack addled welfare-dependent dead beats. There should have been more malt liquor, more sideways-held pistols, more rhyme busting, and more baby mammas. I wanted welfare checks, tearful moms visiting sons in prison, and hos gettin beat down by pimps. Alas, nobody listened. This is why I am gratified by Lowe's decision to pull their advertising. Maybe now we'll get shows about Muslims that better conform with what fox news says about them.
I ended up downloading two movies mentioned in the Wikipedia article about sideways handgun grips: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly and Menace II Society (the latter being the movie that injected the sideways grip into Hip Hip culture). I ended up watching the first half of The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, having seen it once before on VHS in the 1980s back when I was making a point of watching Clint Eastwood's entire filmography. The movie is actually better than I remember it, though the acting looks unnatural to modern sensibilities. (I never did find the scene where supposedly someone uses the sideways handgun grip).
By this evening the weather had begun to turn sharply colder and a penetrating wind had begun to blow.
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