Personal Musings category archive

Reg Henry counsels selfie-restraint. A nugget:

Full disclosure on selfies: While I have not taken a photograph of myself on a cellphone, being sufficiently quaint to think that their main purpose is to make calls, the younger me did squeeze into those little photography booths provided in malls for boys and girls to take a strip of photos of themselves while making funny faces.

But that wasn’t about the photography or the egotism; it was about the squeezing. Not the same thing at all.

Do read the rest.

On the rare times that I see myself in a web cam, cell phone, or tablet pointed at my face, I think, “What a stupid looking pose. Don’t. Just don’t.”

And I listen to me.

It’s amazing how much neat stuff you can get done when you don’t waste your weekend watching football games to see 11 minutes of action per three hours viewing time.

Fifty years ago today at about this time, I was in last-period gym class showering up and rushing to make the school bus. Some of the kids had heard a rumor that something had happened to President Kennedy.

As we were immature white students in a segregated school system in the Jim Crow South, we had little love or respect for that n****r lovin’ Yankee, so joking was taking place.

Then Coach Young, he of the piercing light-blue eyes who could see right through you (who also gave me my first baseball glove years earlier, as he and my father were friends) came into the locker room. His look stilled the room . . . .

I remember watching the funeral and the cortège on television.

I’m not sure, but I think school was closed for a couple of days.

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This weekend, I went to Philadelphia to visit kids.

For grins and giggles, I slapped my dash cam into place and recorded the rides across the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel.

It’s not great cinematography by any means. It’s completely unedited; the camera has a wide-angle lens, so there’s a fisheye effect; and there’s no narration. Nevertheless, if you haven’t crossed the bay on the CBBT, you might enjoy it.

There are three hi-def segments in *.mov format. Because of the hi-def, the files are quite large and may take a while to download:

Northbound Segment One: from the entrance to the south island, where I stopped for breakfast because of the great country ham and the surprisingly reasonable prices (approx. 327MB).

Northbound Segment Two: from the south island to Wise Point (approx. 811MB).

Southbound: Wise Point to Virginia Beach (approx. 1GB).

Last night I watched an episode of Peter Gunn (when I was good, my parents would let me stay up late enough to watch it first-run), which leads me to wonder:

Why is it that, when I was a young ‘un, television shows could tell a complex, nuanced, suspenseful story in half an hour, when today they can’t do it in a season.

Plus it’s got the best theme song ever written.

Grumpity-grump-grump.

How do you teach a cat to cover its nose when it sneezes?

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How can the phrases “Jonas Brothers” and “creative differences” coexist in the same news story?

There is no up-side for singers who try to “stylize” the U. S. National Anthem at sporting events. At best, it’s not so good; at worst, it’s horrifying.

If you see the words “Philadelphia Cheese Steak” on a menu in these parts, whatever you get is likely an abominable and detestable crime against nature.

I’ve finally found an exception–a place that knows that putting steak and cheese in a bun does not magically morph them into a “Philly Cheese Steak,” that cheese steaks do not include chunks of chuck, portions of peppers, tablespoons of tomatoes, or, for Pete’s sake, mounds of (shudder) mayonnaise.

Elias Cafe at Aragona and the Boulevard just a few blocks west of Pembroke makes as good a cheese steak as I ever had at the Deerhead (where the Deerhead double with everything is the cat’s meow and the bee’s knees).

Try it.

They also throw a good breakfast, a great Greek salad, and gorgeous gyros.

Afterthought:

My friend was irritated by my habit of interrogating wait staff about their so-called “cheese steaks” on their menus.

Then she had a cheese steak at Elias Cafe.

She still may not approve, but now she understands . . . .

Every time I must pull (or, more commonly, find a cutting implement to remove) a seal from some simple household product, I damn the Tylenol killer anew.

What’s really sad about this column is not its purported point (that, by how they might look or dress, women don’t “ask for” being raped).

It is the casual, tacit acceptance by the writer, a young college student, that women must routinely worry about being raped.

Persons who complain about “political correctness” signify their wish for a free pass to be offensive.

I lived near and drove in Philly for a quarter century.

This is old news.

The city ranks 188th out of 194th American cities in the ninth annual ranking of safest driving cities in America by insurance giant Allstate, which released its report titled ‘America’s Best Drivers Report’ on Tuesday.

It occurs to me that the silly and stupid fuss over Miley Cyrus’s silly and stupid performance at the MTV awards is emanating from persons who think Hannah Montana is real.

Afterthought:

After I drafted this (you really don’t think I spend all day on this stuff, do you?), I stumbled over an interesting and reasonably sane conversation on this topic at Delaware Liberal.

Addendum, the Next Day:

This article puts the ruckus into a cultural and historical perspective that seems sensible.

Is humanity the culmination of evolution or just the means to its end?

Why do people sop with bread when they could Sopwith Camel?

How were parents able to rear children successfully before psychologists came along to tell them how?

If you have not realized how much television is unmitigated unadulterated untreated sewage, spend a bit of time at alt.binaries.teevee.

Daniel Ruth and I apparently don’t matter any more.

“That’s wonderful, sir,” the woman said. “Now first I have to ask your age.”

“Sure. I’m 63.”

The woman’s brow furrowed as she scanned a long list on her clipboard from hell. Then she did it again. And then, once more, before sheepishly looking up from the market research equivalent of a black spot.

“Uh, I’m very sorry sir, but we don’t have any surveys for someone your age.”

“Nothing? Perhaps you could ask me about dry martinis? Bogart movies? Prunes? Nothing?”

“No sir, nothing at all.”

Read the rest. It’s a hoot.

I have known addicts–addicts to alcohol and other drugs.

If they stop using their drugs of choice, their bodies rebel and they suffer horrible physical torment–nausea, DTs, hallucinations, and more.

If a man stops sending pictures of himself to strangers, I guarantee (as Justin Wilson would have said) that he will not suffer nausea, DTs, and hallucinations.

I can be as lecherous as the next guy, perhaps more lecherous than some, and, because I understand lechery, I have long believed that attempts to create an ailment called “sex addiction” are at best attempts to promote full employment for opportunistic therapists and at worst complete and total garbage.

Really, now, Anthony Weiners of this world, if you don’t press “send” on that SMS, are you going to throw up, have hallucinations, and see pink elephants?

Catherine Bennett reports in the Observer:

Now a new study casts such doubt on previous assumptions about sex addiction that questions are even being asked about Boris Johnson’s alleged satyriasis. Could he be, in fact, normal? Shouldn’t NHS Choices take another look at its claim, on its sex addiction page (with hilarious, addict-face illustration) that: “This addiction is similar to substance abuse because it is caused by the powerful chemical substances released during sex.”

Who wrote that – Tiger Woods?

Because researchers at UCLA tested brain activity in self-diagnosed hypersexual people and found no evidence to separate their participants’ reactions from those of normal people with a high sex drive.

Addiction is a real and horrible thing. I was a smoker. I know.

I’m still an addict, addicted to nicotine, but in gum form, without sucking crap into my lungs. (It’s at least an improvement.)

To use “addiction” as an excuse for being a narcissistic jackass insults every person who has ever struggled with a real physical addiction, from smokers on up.

Being a narcissistic jackass may be a “condition,” but it’s not an addiction.

Addictions are treatable.