Personal Musings category archive

As I walked across the parking lot with my bag of groceries, my thoughts were interrupted by the sound of a Youtube coming from the “smart” phone held by a–er–mature woman heading for the grocery store.

It occurs to me that one of the side effects of always being connected has been to train us that we have a right always to be passively entertained.

And we are forgetting how to entertain ourselves, let alone how to actively engage with reality.

Who the hell comes up with these ideas?

My father was antifa.

He fought against Hitler.

Like most persons who actually see combat, he almost never talked about his experiences. I remember only two comments he made about it in my hearing, and both of them were spontaneous unintentional outbursts in response to scenes on television.

I recall that Bill Mauldin had a term for persons who might talk about combat. He called them “garritroopers” and described them as “too far forward to wear dress uniforms and and too far back to be shot at.”

Afterthought:

Every American should be proudly antifa. Being “fa” is antithetical to being American.

When television bright lights end a series’s season with a cliffhanger, are they seriously expecting the audience to remember it week later, let alone breathlessly obsess over it all summer?

Furrfu.

(The last NCIS episode of the season is the proximate cause of this question, but it goes for all of those that do this.)

The Bat, by Mary Roberts Rinehart. If you would rather read the story, you can find the print version at Project Gutenberg.

Some think that this novel helped inspire the comic book hero, Batman.

Afterthought:

When I was a young ‘un, my mother would patronize a local fabric shop run by a lady named Gin Walker, who also was a milliner. Mrs. Walker, being no dummy, had several boxes of comic books for her customers’ kids to read while their mothers browsed.

As my mother selected fabrics for sewing, my brother and I would sit under the display tables which held the fabrics and read the comic books.

That’s where I first met Batman.

Many years ago, I played chess. Then I discovered contract bridge, and my days of chess playing ended.

Recently, as I realized that the likelihood that I will ever again sit around a card table with three other persons had become remote, I decided to take up chess again. Plus chess is something that you don’t need an opponent to enjoy; there are puzzles and collections of classic games that you can work through on your own.

I found a couple of books on chess at Project Gutenberg (one by Lasker and one one by Capablanca, two legendary Master), got purchased a boot of simple puzzles, and started to try to get my hand in again. In fact, I’m even playing a game with someone on another continent via DMs at a geeky forum that I frequent.

That’s all in the way of a rambling lead in to this: we found the chess set in a Crusades style in house and neither of us knows where it came from. It is quite eye-catching.

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Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, episodes S3 E11 and S3 E12.

They’re not science fiction. They’re prophecy.

You can view them on Netflix, and likely other services also.

I mailed my state and federal tax payments today, certified return receipt because I want to know that they got there.

The clerk at the post office was most affable. Indeed, I had to admonish her, “Why are you having so much fun on the job? Don’t you think there is a reason they call it ‘work’?”

As Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., once said, “I like paying taxes. They buy me civilization.”

The Film Mystery, by Arthur B. Reeve.

In addition to being a decent mystery read quite competently, it was written in the age of the silents and is an interesting journey back in time. It will recall you to the film-making techniques of an earlier era.

Thanks to Donald Trump, we now know what happens when you try to run the government like a business.

(Misplet wrod correxed.)