Personal Musings category archive

Is there now or has there ever been a toll-free number where the menu options haven’t recently changed?

Whenever I ride my bicycle, I remember this story. But it does not apply just to bicyclists.

When I was in high school, one of my fellow high-schoolers was in a collision.

He had a Honda 350 motorcycle back when Honda 350s were the cat’s meow and the bee’s knees.

He was driving up the highway, a wide open country highway, when a lady pulled out in front of him from a stop sign.

He collided with her and sprawled across the hood of her car. (Fortunately, he lived.)

The lady told the cops, “I looked both ways and I did not see a car.”

If you aren’t willing to see it, it doesn’t exist until it hits you full force.

And that is true not just on the highways.

Farewell to Maj. Sidney Freedman of M*A*S*H,

Whenever he appeared in an episode, it was always a good episode.

I hope that my mind and heart are never so old and shriveled that I want to live in a “55 and up” community.

The haters are going to hate, and that’s no speculation.

Afterthought:

Cowering in the bottom of a trailer boat in someone’s backyard was likely not an expectation.

When Ronald Reagan was shot, I was working in Washington, D. C., actually not too far, as distances are measured in cities, from the site.

My first reaction on learning the identity of his shooter was, “Thank God he wasn’t black.”

I had seen that racial prejudice was central to the Reagan appeal and knew that, if the suspect were black, a backlash of hatred and bigotry would ensue. (Stuff like this.)

Haters always look for an excuse to unleash their hate.

I had the same reaction today when I saw the FBI’s pictures of possible Boston bombing suspects on the inner webs.

From the How about a Little Good News Dept.

In St. Pete, Margaret Austin is teaching cribbage to kids at the Northside Boys and Girls Club. She needs cribbage boards.

My father loved cribbage–in fact, he loved card games of all types, except for the ones that required betting to be fun (try playing poker without betting something–can’t do it). I remember playing cribbage with him, but it was so long ago that I’d have to read up on the rules before I could play again.

A cornerstone of the self-image of many white Southerners is refusing to accept that their ancestors, those who wore the grey (as mine did), wanted to perpetuate a way of life based on holding a people in captivity and stealing their labor.

Those Southerners and their wannabe fellow-travelers, dupes, and symps will jump through all kinds of crazy, stupid hoops to avoid that truth.

Finally, bicycle weather. I’m not one to bundle up and go for a ride in the cold. My stationary bike is just fine in the winter.

But the real one is more fun. I treated it to new pedals this year.

First three-mile ride today!

The big fuss in the wire stories today seems to be “Zero TV Homes.” The story seems to be leading all over the landscape.

None of the reports take note of the correlation between “zero TV homes” and the reality (shows) of “zero TV TV.”

Mad Men: Downton Abbey for the colonies.

It is much better to take a long stretch than to serve a long stretch.

Leonard Pitts, Jr., calls tech support.

BTDT.

Aside:

The surest way for a company to change my polite inquiry into incoherent rage is to force me to use a voice-activated menu, usually read by a woman who has overdosed on uppers and become lost in some delusional Bali Hai.

Got myself a triceps bar.

Nothing shakes my faith more than the antics of those who loudly anoint themselves the “faithful.”

It occurs to me that one of the principle drivers of economic inequality over the past 40 years has been the shift to financing education with student loans, which harness students to a life of debt and debt to finance debt, sucking their earnings into the coffers of the masters of the universe for most of the rest of their economic lives.

Any Scotch is better than every anything else.

And, to quote an old co-worker of mine,

if God hae wanted to hae water in it, He’d hae put water in it.

Happy Saturday Night.

Miles Groth searches for the secret garden.

A great deal has been written about the behavior of boys and men, but little has been said about the experience of being male. Boys may be understandably inarticulate about what they are going through, but men’s silence about their inner lives (except for the poets) is another matter.

Frankly, I wasn’t aware that I had an inner life.

I have a code in de dose.

Looking for something to listen to as I lay on my back too wiped out even to achieve Enlightenment with Slackware (I’m preparing a podcast on E17), I finally visited LibriVox; I had heard of the site, but not visited it.

It is the Project Gutenberg of audio books. (Oh, yes, Gutenberg also has audiobooks. They work with Librivox, among others.)

I listened to part of this last night; it started slow, but then picked up nicely. (I’m a mystery buff. Not suspense. Not adventure. Mystery, which ideally opens with the body on the library floor and closes with the Great Detective explaining the solution in that same library.)

Check out LibriVox. And if you have never visited Project Gutenberg, now is the time.

Is Lady Gaga the P. T. Barnum of our time?