Monday, June 19, 2017
Eric Idle - "Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life" - STEREO HQ
This is the best advice in all situations. What else are you going to do?
That pain in your shoulder will probably resolve with some physical therapy. (And you can find plenty of physical therapy on the Internet without going broke paying for it.) Those chest pains are almost certainly just an unfortunate, but not too dangerous, side-effect of the medicine that's got your blood pressure down to the very good range. And seriously, I'll bet almost nobody gets the side effect called, "kidney damage." Losing a few teeth might get you a nicer smile, and lots of people seem to eat very effectively with dentures. Lying quietly in bed is almost as good as sleeping, and without those annoying bad dreams!
Look on the bright side! If that gets too difficult, try a trip to Walmart. Looking around at your fellow shoppers should do wonders for your perspective.
Your job should cheerfully renew your contract for next year. Why wouldn't they? Not paying your salary would represent such a small savings to them, why should they bother firing you? The likelihood that those merciless gangsters in Washington D.C. could do such financial mischief that it would destroy the savings of everyone in America is very, very slim.
So why worry? Especially if you're pushing seventy, like I am. It's only a couple of more years, whatever happens. You're short! A few hundred days and a "wake up." As the Marines used to say, "you could do that walking on your hands."
Look for the good!
Thursday, June 15, 2017
The Seven Deadly Sins, Presidential Edition
Saligia! The mnemonic for the Seven Deadly Sins in
Latin.*
1.
Superbia (Pride);
2.
Avaeritia (Greed);
3.
Luxuria (Lust);
4.
Invidia (Envy);
5.
Gula (Gluttony);
6.
Ira (Wrath); and
7.
Acedia (Sloth).
Most of us have a touch of these things in us, more or
less. Like the professionals say, it’s not a problem unless it affects your
life, or the lives of loved ones. Some people are experts in many or most of
these things. They’re going to hell for sure.
The only person that I can think of who excels at all
seven is President Donald John Trump.
Oh, I hear you say, but President Trump is not lazy at
all! Well, it may be technically true that he is busy for much of every day,
but he spends much of that time sitting around thinking his horrible thoughts
and otherwise violating the other Deadly Sins. He is proud of the fact that he
takes no exercise, correctly declining to claim that golf qualifies. And he is
certainly lazy-minded. When asked about his favorite book, he seemed to be at a
loss to recall just what a book was, exactly. “The Bible!” he finally blurted
out, and “The Art of the Deal!” Sad!
Concerning the other six, there is no argument. Guilty!
It’s another interesting point of comparison with our
most recent ex-president, Barack Obama. Mr. Obama may be guilty of a touch of
pride, although I would argue that even that would be forgivable. Of the rest,
Mr. Obama is innocent. Compared to DJT, Obama is a saint.
You may apply the list to other recent presidents if
you wish. It’s an interesting exercise. Of the saints, there is room for
discussion. Who is the most innocent of the bunch? But of the sinners, it’s really
no contest. We have a winner! Ladies and gentlemen! President Donald J. Trump!
*I learned about Saligia in Dan Brown’s latest railway
novel, Inferno.
Monday, June 12, 2017
Six Turning Four Burning - Convair B-36 "Peacemaker" (HD)
Jimmy Stewart actually flew bombers in World War II. He was awarded two Distinguished Flying Crosses and the French gave him a Croix de Guerre to boot. You've got to watch out for the quiet ones.
I love this movie. "Strategic Air Command." It's got great flying footage by the yard, and just enough drama to keep it off life-support.
Sunday, June 11, 2017
Our New Adolescence
An adolescence is a sudden burst of growth, after which
we find that we are different enough from our former selves to require a period
of adjustment. When doctors or police refer to “adolescents,” they mean teenagers,
but that’s not the only adolescence. We all go through a few that are well
observed by medical professionals and a couple more on our own personal
schedules. They can be difficult.
Changes overtake us as we get older, and the entire
thing can be confusing. There’s a dynamic at work that will be familiar to
anyone who has raised children. You spend a year or two getting the hang of
handling a baby. Then the baby is gone, and you must learn to take care of a
toddler. After that, you need to discover the comforts and dangers of being
responsible for a four or five year old. The point being that none of this
prepares you for the pleasures and dangers of having a six or seven year old on
your hands. At each stage, you must master a new skill-set, and when that stage
is complete you are thrown back into ignorance by circumstances. Our own lives
come in a very similar pattern.
In my case, right now, I wonder what exactly is causing
that new pain in my left shoulder. Is it a late onset of rheumatoid arthritis? That
would be terrible. Is my new mattress too hard? Is it a reappearance of an
injury-based discomfort that was caused when I was about thirty-years-old at a
job that required repeated impact shocks to my shoulders? That pair of injuries
was never diagnosed, even though my shoulders hurt more or less for over ten
years. Is it part of what the doctors characterize as the normal degenerative
changes of osteoarthritis? What is the whole range of things that it could be?
I’ve been putting off seeking a medical opinion on the
matter, but I suppose that I should go to see an orthopedist. It has been a
year now, and it’s getting more annoying. There’s no sense in waiting, really.
X-rays and exams are cheap where I live. And what’s the harm of asking? It
might even be something that shows up clearly in x-rays and could be dealt with
in a straightforward manner, perhaps arthroscopically. Who knows?
That’s the real point, isn’t it? “Who knows?” Certainly
I don’t know. But I know that sleeping exclusively on my right side is not
going to work out in the long run, and waiting around for miracles is never a
good plan of action. So that’s it, then, go to the hospital and see an
orthopedist.
Having learned the intricacies of many of life’s phases
already, I must now master a new set of variables. I, along with many of my
fellow Baby Boomers, am in a new adolescence. My current stage of life could be
called, “officially old but not yet decrepit.” I have resolved to keep my
happy-face on. After all, it’s only pain, time, confusion, embarrassment and
money. Life has worse things than those to throw at us. And that’s the real
point: if the worst isn’t happening yet, don’t start to complain! It could be
much worse, and it probably will be much worse before long. I must enjoy myself
while I still can, or be condemned as an ungrateful wretch.
That was fun! Writing things out really does enhance
understanding.
Wednesday, June 7, 2017
roy buchanan - peter gunn theme
You can pass a pleasant hour listening to versions of the Peter Gunn Theme, most of which come under the name of one guitar player or another. Then you come to the version by Roy "I Don't Need No Fucking Saxophone Players" Buchanan.
Good one, Roy.
Albert King - The Hunter
Well live and learn. I've been familiar with this song in versions by Free and Ike and Tina Turner for forty years but I just caught on to the Albert King connection. In the comments to this YouTube entry we are informed that the song was written by "Booker T. and the M.G.'s," who provided back up on Albert's album.
Music can be a long, strange road.
James Ray - Got My Mind Set On You
And a shout out to the late George Harrison of the Beatles, because this process of being informed about obscure or (in this case) forgotten music was an ongoing one.
George's version of this song was pretty good, and the video was eye-catching. I don't think that either the song or the video ever got anywhere, but they served to introduce me to James Ray. I bought an LP and a CD and I've been a fan ever since.
Slim Harpo - I Got Love If You Want It
This was the great gift of the Rolling Stones: they shined a light on so much great American music that was being sorely neglected by 90% of the population of the United States.
I was just a kid in Queens, New York City. What did I have access too? The radio? Sure, we had two black radio stations in New York, WWRL ("The Big RL") and what was the "jazz" station, WBLS? Something like that. I listened to WWRL a bit, more later on, after the 'Stones had hit. But even there, you wouldn't hear the deep stuff, the real Blues. No, not even Slim Harpo, not a bit. There was no way that I was going to hear about this stuff unless the 'Stones shined a light on it.
One of the attractions of the Rolling Stones for me was that they valued the music that I had already discovered on my own. The semi-regional hits from New Orleans ("She Said Yeh!" "Pain in My Heart," etc.). Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley. I didn't need any help there. That was the door opening. But the Rolling Stones led me to a whole new level, a couple of levels, of black American music that I had had no access to on my own.
So thanks for that, band members living and dead. The Rolling Stones! Thanks, guys! I'll be a fan as long as I last. Y'all made my life a lot more interesting than it was before I heard you.
Tuesday, June 6, 2017
Now I Understand Binge Watching
I used to marvel at the entire concept of binge
watching. I’d read about people staying up all night to watch an entire season
of House of Cards or something and I’d wonder what was on their minds. Why
would they do such a thing? Do they need to return the DVD set to a friend?
More likely they are watching on one of the subscription services and would be
able to watch a couple of episodes per day until they had finished the series.
Shouldn’t that be enough? I could not see the rhyme or reason of the behavior
at all. That changed the other day.
No, I am not in danger of binge watching TV shows. But
I have come to understand the attraction of it.
I signed up for iFlix this week. It was a simple
process, and after a few minutes I was all set up and ready to peruse their
catalog and begin watching. The catalog is substantial, and there were many
movies and shows that were of interest to me. I checked with the IMDB for
reviews of several of the shows, and quickly realized that a few of the ones
that interested me were highly reviewed and featured actors whose work I
admire.
I began watching season one, episode one of Gotham. The
production design is wonderful; the cast is excellent and performing at the
height of their powers; the story is clever and the dialog is crisp. Almost
before I knew it, I had watched three episodes. (They’re only about forty-two
minutes long without commercials or station breaks.) At the end of each
episode, a small dialog box comes on next to the credits, saying “the next
episode will begin in six seconds.” The easiest thing to do is just let it
roll.
I stopped after three episodes, but I could easily understand
that if I were of a slightly different cast of mind, or rather younger than I
am, I might have watched all of season one straight through, finishing up after
midnight. There are several things at work here:
1.
There is no additional fee for watching
more content;
2.
Remaining in place and continuing to watch
is easy;
3.
You are at every stage interested to find
out what happens next; and, most importantly
4.
You no doubt have a long list of entire TV
shows that you want to watch.
If you don’t get busy crossing shows off of your to-do
list, you’ll never get to see all the shows that you want to watch.
I’m sure that many viewers get a feeling of
considerable accomplishment after watching, let’s say, both seasons of Aquarius
at one sitting. Mission accomplished! It enables you to move on to the next
show, Bosch, let’s say. This kind of positive reinforcement is a strong
motivating factor.
I do not expect to sit straight through six or eight
hours of TV any time soon. The positive reinforcement that I seek most ardently
is a good night’s sleep that starts well before midnight. But I do understand the concept of binge watching
much better now that the mechanism for expressing the behavior is in my power.
Regarding iFlix in general,
I give it two thumbs up.
Monday, June 5, 2017
Donald Trump's Great Gift To America
Some of us have been worried about the condition of
American democracy for a while now. I started worrying a bit earlier than most, but I
think that the real worries started when Reagan was president. Preaching that
the Federal Government in Washington was the problem was something new and
insidious. It was a breathtakingly cynical and dangerous tactic in that it
could snap back and bite Republicans as well as Democrats. Reaching out to the
snake-handlers was dangerous as well, because the willfully ignorant are always
unpredictable. Skewing all of the financial policies of the United States in
favor of the very wealthy and corporations was obviously problematic, because
the very foundation of the country’s prosperity was the middle-class that more
enlightened policies had created. The “law and order” groundwork that had been
laid before Reagan became the springboard for a three decades long hurricane of
“tough on crime” legislation that could only serve to move huge numbers of
citizens into prisons and destabilize communities. The list could go on, but my
point is that our real worries started with Reagan.
Yes, we have had worries a’plenty to occupy our minds.
They have eaten away at us at an ever increasing pace for three decades, but
now it appears that the end of worry is at hand. That, my friends, is Donald
Trump’s great gift to our nation. Worry, always an emotion of dubious practical
value, can now safely be replaced by the atavistic fear of what appears before
our very eyes. The conflicts and tendencies that have caused us to worry for so
long have at last been resolved. The war of chaos against order has been won,
and chaos now reins from horizon to horizon. Evil has triumphed over good. More
fool us, for letting it all happen, but by now it is an accomplished reality. What
follows will be a New Dark Ages, the course of which will need to be undergone
before it can be properly understood. Its duration and intensity remain
mysterious to us, but it will not be over quickly, and it will not be painless.
It is safe to say that the future generations that may judge us at their
leisure have not yet been born.
Donald Trump is not the architect of the terror that is
now set to befall us; he is merely the capstone on the pyramid of chaos that
now encloses us. He is the poster-child. His arrival in office signaled the
victory. Whether he continues in office or is drummed out, whether he lives or
chokes on a burnt steak, the brick house of chaos will remain, because the edifice
is strong and it exists independent of his authority. Donald Trump is only the
herald who brings the news that the American experiment is now over. Our future
as a democracy has been extinguished. It is his gift to us, the gift of
certainty. We need no longer worry about America’s future; now we must only
live in the future that has been ordained for us.
For thirty years we could have been forgiven to hope
that our politicians would learn again the skills of working together and
achieving compromise. Our two major political parties have always been at each
other’s necks, but they did generally manage to cooperate when the stakes were
high. This was true even in the 1970s. That ability was weakened rapidly after
that, and had disappeared altogether by 1992. By 2000, politics in America had
become a winner-take-all proposition that was being run on a total-war footing.
A certain political party accomplished this
militarization of politics almost on its own, with a little help from the
Supreme Court along the way. Yes, that party. The party of self-interest. The
party of individual responsibility. The party of cut taxes on those who can
most afford to pay them, raise spending on the military, and who needs a social
safety net anyway. The party of Gerrymandering and voter suppression. The
anti-science, anti-worker, anti-minority, anti-intellectual, anti-immigrant, and
anti-democracy party. Them. And it worked. They won the presidency, both houses
of congress, and the Supreme Court. (The latter by a spectacular act of hubris
and borderline treason. Total war at its most brutal.) Add that to their
control of about thirty-five states legislatures and their governorships, and
you’ve got the hat-trick of all time.
The chaos engendered by that certain political party
has seeped down into society in general to the extent that our very culture is
now drenched in chaos. Most of the progress that was achieved in my lifetime in
matters of tolerance, rights and freedoms has evaporated. We live with an
epidemic of violence that is so virulent that we can hardly keep up with the
details anymore. Mass shootings; police shootings; hate crimes; the news is
abuzz with them. You can’t keep track of who hates who without a scorecard. The
Venn diagram of hatred in modern America would cover the wall of a gymnasium. We
have seen our constitutional rights either degraded or jettisoned entirely, and
this is getting worse as we speak. The war on order and decorum that has swept
America has lately been extended to the international stage, with attacks on
trade, the ecology, democratic allies, foreign aid, international cooperation
and the arts. You youngsters out there can take my word for it: America these
days is an unrecognizable shadow of its former self. For most Americans, the
standard of living is quickly descending to the level of a developing country. The
only things that are thriving are the military and the energy industry, and, of
course, Google, Facebook, and the ever-burgeoning billionaire class.
It is disturbing that most Americans seem to be taking
all of this almost casually. Some do complain about Trump or express mild
concern about Republicans in congress, but most of the non-Trump voters just
hold their noses and remain firmly on the sidelines. I wonder if they think
that it’s all just a matter of waiting for the adults to take charge again. They
act like nothing is happening. Or maybe they realize that something has
happened, the tense of the verb has shifted, and there’s nothing more to be
done about it at this point.
Optimists will say that the pendulum will soon swing
the other way and things will begin to improve, or even return to normal. The mechanisms for that don't even exist anymore. Even the concept of “one
man, one vote” has been reduced to an echo of its former self, and I’m not sure
that it was ever all that it was cracked up to be.
Some will say that our democratic institutions will dig
in their heels and fight back against the tide of willful destruction that is
now underway. I wish them luck, really I do, but we’re seeing how easy it is to
marginalize most of them through intentionally destructive appointments and
budget cuts. The courts are offering some encouragement, but they can only
speak to matters that are properly before them, and any of them could be
overruled by the Supreme Court. (Yes, let that sink in a moment.) Our very
laws, historically one of our most powerful democratic institutions, have been
subverted and turned into tools of oppression by strict liability, anti-recidivist
laws, sentencing guidelines, and the criminalization of everything. Some of the
citizens who protested Trump’s inauguration have been charged with a truly
staggering battery of crimes and are looking at prison sentences running into
the decades.
I could be wrong, and I sincerely hope that I am wrong,
but it seems that America has turned a corner and that it will be very
difficult to return to any prior state of affairs. This is no longer the world
as it once was. The entire web of human interaction has been altered completely
in the last ten years by the Internet and smart phones. There is no longer an
immediate past to return to. The presidency of Bill Clinton is as remote from
us as the Civil War. That entire society is as gone as Blockbuster Video.
The model for surviving in the coming society will, I’m
afraid, be the rat. People will prosper only to the extent that they can keep
themselves in the dark, safe spaces, darting out in the shadows to obtain what
they need to live.
So thanks, President Trump. Certain knowledge beats
worrying any day.
As I finish this silly blog post, I am seriously
debating with myself whether it would be prudent to put it up on my truly
insignificant blog. After all, it’s easily conceivable that algorithms in some
supercomputer somewhere will eventually chew threw every word of it and find
something that violates a new Federal law! It could be subversive! Huge fines
and a prison sentence might be involved! I am not enough of a glory hound to be
pleased with that prospect.
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