I HOPE YOU DON'T MIND, FOLKS, the fact that, heretofore, Your Correspondent had been posting most of his essays in this new blog on a "postdated" basis; i.e., for posting @ a later time.

Circumstances, though, prompt moi to try posting "on the fly," as it were.

The which I will get to shortly.

But first: I thought I'd let you know of an informative and worthwhile series forthcoming as will be of especial interest to certain scions @ the Elmer Gantry Institute of Religiopolitical Theology challenging the legality as much as the constitutionality of free public education, and proscriptions on the use of public monies to fund religious or otherwise sectarian systems of education (including, methinks, Christian Homeschooling curricular material), and hope to use the courts to make their case (unaware of the likelihood for same being dismissed as frivolous, vexatious or otherwise unwise use of court time and resources).

And the form of challenge? Actual clauses from the several State Constitutions on the points @ issue.

So do bookmark this site, and please tell your friends about this forthcoming series of importance. Remember: "The truth is mighty, and will prevail."

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COULD BRITNEY SPEARS BE THE NEXT FRANCES FARMER? Recent news reports about the mental and psychoemotional breakdown of singer Britney Spears, culminating in her current 72-Hour Hold for psychiatric evaluation in the wake of a recent court ruling forcing her to surrender legal custody of her children to her former husband, excesses of sensationalism and unhealthy attention in some prolefeed channels notwithstanding, may be enough to Your Correspondent's mind to recall the tragic life of actress Frances Farmer (1914-1970), once billed as a likely and promising rival to Greta Garbo ... only to see her career collapse all the more by virtue of psychiatric ill-treatment, cruelty and the overdomineering designs of her publicity-seeking mother.

Her notriety, if you could call it that, could first be traced to 1931, when, as a high school student in Seattle, she won $500 in an essay contest for her essay "God Dies," wherein she challenged the existance of The Deity openly--and, in the process, began attracting the attention of critics as were quick to label her as a "Communist sympathiser," "pinko" and worse.

Soon afterwards, Farmer would win a competition sponsored by the Communist-leaning magazine New Masses as included an audition on Broadway and passage to Moscow for a visit to a theater there. On her return, she would attract the affections of dramatist Clifford Odets, in time appearing in the stage version of his play Golden Boy on Broadway.

Hollywood quickly expressed interest, with Paramount signing Farmer to a stock seven-year contract as was common in Hollywood's Golden Age; too often, however, Paramount would farm out Frances Farmer to other studios, quickly earning resentment of The Hollywood System on her part. And before long, she would wind up getting rather forgettable B-picture roles until some misadventures with tequila on the set of the Monogram Pictures production No Escape earned her the wrath of the courts--and loss of plum roles.

By the end of 1942, a chain of headline-generating incidents would mean the end of Frances Farmer's Hollywood prospects:

• Her arrest for drunk driving, driving with high-beam headlights in a wartime dim-out zone and assaulting the arresting officer.
• Failing to meet with her probation officer led to her infamous arrest in the nude from her suite @ the Knickerbocker Hotel in Santa Monica, drunk and screaming Billingsgate. On arrival @ the police station, she used an obscene term in describing her profession.
• Following her sentence to penal servitude, with the judge essentially "throwing the book" @ Miss Farmer, she screamed obscenities @ police officers and press reporters, even kicking the camera of a press photographer to the point of causing damage.
• Her mother, back in Seattle, would essentially sign her death warrant vis-a-vis Hollywood by suggesting that she be placed in a private insane asylum for treatment, or what passed for it in those days.

In time, however, Frances Farmer would become a has-been, eventually being committed to the Washington state asylum in Steliacoom and, in the process, suffering all manner of psychiatric abuse, cruelty and indignities @ the hands of medical staff and orderlies, including witnessing episodes of lesbian rape as a means of asserting power and authority and being tricked into doing sexual favours. (Her own sordid account was, fortunately, recorded for posterity in her memoirs, Will There Really Be a Morning?, published following her death from cancer in 1970. Alone.)

Reduced to a shell of her former self following her undergoing an icepick lobotomy in 1948, it would be ten years before Frances Farmer would find the strength to return to Hollywood for one last film appearence in The Party Crashers; soon afterwards, she would move to Indianapolis, where she hosted a teatime movie programme on a local TV station until shortly before her decease.

So: Could it be likely that the ghost of Frances Farmer may be ready to haunt Britney Spears before too long, as if her younger daughter Jamie Lynn's being enciente wasn't making things difficult enough?

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THERE IS NO ROYAL ROAD TO ENERGY SELF-SUFFICENCY: Even with much of the attention in the oil and gas industries being drawn to the Bakken field across western North Dakota and eastern Montana, perhaps the single hottest area for oil and gas exploration right now, don't expect that area alone to be the "magic bullet" as winds up seeing oil prices falling below $100/bbl within measurable distance.

Which begs the question of whether certain elements of His Fraudulency's "inside of the inside" may secretly be playing the crude-oil futures markets with all the recent cuts in military pay and benefits, and hoping to make a cheap and quick killing in the process.

As if that weren't enough:

Parade, the Sunday rotogravure magazine supplement, had a rather embarrassing item recently about the real cost of developing energy self-sufficency based on maintaining dependency upon oil and gas--costs to health and environment, it turns out.

On the one hand, extraction of crude oil and natural gas ex-wellhead requires all manner of toxic chemicals as can affect drinking water quality, including benzene, arsenic and mercury. And in some of the older fields approaching the end of their productive life, producers have been known to add other toxic substances to boost what little output may still be extractable.

But, thanks to the petroleum industry's connexions in Congress, wellhead owners have exemptions from mandates in the Safe Drinking Water Act and the Clean Air Act, among other environmental-protection laws; this extends to exemptions from requirements for reporting toxic-material releases.

Add to that complaints of many living close to oil and gas wells of all manner of health problems as include painful blisters, headaches, nausea, nosebleeds and even cancers, for which the oil and gas industry will likely suggest that complaints thereof are probably "hypochondria" or "psychosomatic" in the hope of avoiding liability.

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Back to the Bakken field for a moment: For want of suitable facilities for processing natural gas ex-wellhead, flaring off gas therefrom seems to be more the rule than the exception, so explaining why the nighttime skies of western North Dakota especially might be a little brighter without the Northern Lights taken into account.

Even if it means wasting substantial quantities of natural gas in the bargain.

(Historical Sidelight: Following the Turner Valley naptha gas discoveries in the Canadian province of Alberta in the mid-1920's, flaring off wellheads was so common, it was said that one could read an evening paper on the streets of nearby Calgary without recourse to artificial light.)

There is no royal road to energy self-sufficency, Your Fraudulency....