S.C. Dixon-ary

IT’S ALL ABOUT ATTITUDE
By S. C. Dixon

I have friends from Europe who visit L.A., some like it, in a perverse sort of way, but most do not. For some the attraction seems to be the same as passing by a car wreck on the way home from work. You don’t want to see the ugliness of it but it is simply impossible to look away. It is called “morbid fascination” and it’s a perfectly human trait, as sad as that may be.

Californians mistakenly take this for some form of admiration when in point of fact it has been said widely and often that Los Angeles is the butt-hole of America.

This is simply not true!

L.A. is the butt-hole of the world! (more…)

FREEDOM FROM THE PRESS by S. C. Dixon
blog.scdixon.com

The latest incarnation of the Press Gone Wild has been the nonsensical verging on hysterical coverage of vice president Cheney’s accidental shooting of his friend, Harry Whittington.
First off, I’m not a big fan of Dick Cheney’s but it’s an easy assumption, when one first hears of a story like this, that it’s going to be big news for a day or two. I was looking forward to the evening news so that I could find out what had happened. Instead of a “story” the media has turned it into a witch-hunt.
Some of what has been said and written, particularly by the likes of Maureen Dowd, a Pulitzer Prize winner, by-the-bye, have gone beyond the usual vitriolic hatred of Bush/Cheney which I’ve become accustomed to, to becoming something that is downright weird if not actually frightening.
If you have not read Maureen’s “Shooter Slips On A Silencer” (© Maureen Dowd, The New York Times, February 15, 2006) do yourself a favor, do a web search, and give it a read. It is simply one of the strangest pieces I’ve ever read, written by a supposedly “professional” journalist. (more…)

THE COMPLETE TRAVELS OF
OUR MR. DIXON

Beginning with: From Oz to Trafalgar
A trip journal of London & Bath, England
1997
by S. C. Dixon

Forward
By the time I finally got around to re-reading this journal, and thus editing it, several years had passed and this particular trip was but a memory. In the meantime I’d put three more trips under my belt. In retrospect it I found that I was now somewhat embarrassed by the “oh gosh, gee whiz” attitude it often presents and I was very tempted to change it. Significantly. I also found several inaccuracies, misconceptions and plainly wrong-headed information that I was sorely tempted to alter. After all, even the title is in error. We never really went to Trafalgar, did we? We’d gone to Trafalgar Square, which is quite a different place indeed. Eventually, however, I decided to just leave it as it is. Despite its sometimes obvious inadequacies it is, after all, an honest document of one man’s first glimpse of an old world seen through new eyes and that, I think, is a reasonably charming quality on its own.
S. C. DIXON

“England is the paradise of individuality, eccentricity, heresy, anomalies, hobbies and humours”… George Santayana in “Soliloquies in England”

“When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford… Dr. Samuel Johnson quoted in Boswell’s “Life of Samuel Johnson,” 1777

~

In the last light of day I looked out of my window and saw huge mountains of ice surrounded by blue water. It was the last thing that I saw as darkness fell. The view of the ocean somewhere between Greenland and the North Pole is pretty damned impressive from 30,000 feet up, especially to a boy from Kanzas.
“OZ,” as we natives know it. In fact, people from just about everywhere remember the Frank L. Baum books or the movie, “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.” Of course, people generally seem to miss the fact that the fabled Dorothy leaves Kanzas for OZ, but then the argument has been made that since she never really left her home except in a dream that, ergo, Kanzas is OZ and OZ is Kanzas. Either way, her famous words replayed in my mind, “Toto, I don’t think we’re in Kanzas any more!”
The jet was pointed toward London, England and it was my first trip outside the USA except for a couple of jaunts to Mexico in the halcyon days of my youth. (I’ve always wondered if the citizens of Mexico resent the fact that most people from the U.S. will say, “I’ve never been out of the country EXCEPT for Mexico,” as if to imply that Mexico doesn’t really count for much.) (more…)