People ask me why I don't do politics on this blog.
Good Grief - don't you get enough?
In my opinion there's just too much politics on social media - ever since the founding parents used Twitter to can George III
Some unpleasantness followed that particular slight, and politics has been unpleasant ever since. It's kind of like criminal assault except politicians are asking the voters to shoot themselves.
And Winny was one of the good ones.
Thankfully, we have an alert, savvy American electorate, well qualified to sort the bad from the worse.
And so we get the best and the brightest to serve our nations interests.
Bowing to popular demand, I'll post some of the partisan political pictures that hopefully represent both sides equally.
From the Right
From the left
From the right
From the left
From the right
From the left
George III is looking better and better
I like to think that sometimes stupidity can rise above partisanship
But usually it gets downright mean-spirited - especially towards the current front-runners.
If these our our best choices next year, maybe 240 years of independence is enough. Maybe we've learned our lesson.
Do you think she'd...
Get Chuck and Camilla to abdicate, and you got my vote, Lady!
I've been writing with a 65-year-old typewriter
recently. Just twenty years ago I did all my writing on this
machine. I can't believe how hard it is to press down the keys - I'm
such a finger wimp.
And it's modern technology that has made me this finger
wimp. Before Windows 95 (which came with the first really workable
version of MS Word,) it was less bother to type and deal with the
typos and double strikes than to work through the inscrutable
instructions that were required to make Dos compatible documents look
like a literary form of pointillism?
Reference too obscure? How about a Jackson Pollock
painting?
Ant tracks through butter?
Okay to make a crappy looking printed thingy.
But technology doesn't move forward in lock-step. There
were things we did better years ago than we do today. NASA sent men
to the moon with computers that had less capacity than a Dollar Store
calculator,
but they couldn't repeat that feat today.
And why is Southern California turning into a desert
when we had water desalination plants back in the 70s? Is it lost
technology or have they been banned because they block the sea-side
views of movie people?
Then there's the Bic pen. Everyone knows the Bic pen -
the greatest thing to come out of France that you couldn't consume at a
garden party. It's still a decent cheap pen, but it's nothing like
it once was.
Back in the late 60s and into the 70s, the Bic pen was
an engineering marvel. They boasted that their pens wrote "first
time, every time." You never had to scribble little circles in
your notebook (or on your textbook,) to get a Bic to start. If you
could see any ink through the two semi-transparent tubes, you knew
you could write with it. It even wrote for a while after you stopped
seeing ink.
Bic used to challenge customers to use all the ink in a
Bic before you lost it, cooked it with your cigarette lighter, (I
don't know why we did that, but we did,) or someone took it.
Being an obedient obsessive-compulsive, I took up the
challenge.
I’ve never had any abilities with art, but thankfully,
the early 70s didn’t require that. I covered my notebooks,
textbooks, even my bell-bottomed jeans with intricate mazes, irregular
paisleys, tight concentric circles, and block figures in Bic blue,
black, red, and occasionally green. I wasn’t striving for artistic
effect; my goal was to use ink (and waste time.) I wasn’t the only
one doing this. The ubiquity of Bic pens, and the challenge to use
them up had several of my dimmer classmates doing it as well.
I managed to use up two or three which earned me a
“whoa” from a fellow idiot or two, and marked indifference from
the brighter members of my class.
And it made me buy more pens, which of course, was the
whole point of the Bic campaign.
Today’s Bic pens look like the pens of yesteryear, but
like most cheap pens, fail to write long before the ink disappears
from the tube – some never write at all. I continue to buy them
hoping to one day find one that will continue writing all the way to
the end. Of course that requires that I buy a lot more pens.
Wait a minute – I buy a lot more pens...
Maybe Bic has moved their technology ahead after all.
In an unrelated subject, I recently found out that Mel Tillis is still alive.
There are so many conspiracies out there that I have
nothing to do with, so it's nice to have one where I'm on the inside
- in the know - initiated. Even if it means I blow the cover for
youngest children world-wide, well, what can I say?
I'm a youngest. We're inherently irresponsible.
Those of you who are youngest children can go back to
driving your older sib's car and bringing it back with no gas, or
blowing off a job interview to enter a Galaga tournament.
You know
all this stuff. For you older, only, or middles, I'm about to
confirm what you've suspected for years.
We do all this stuff that drives you crazy - ON PURPOSE!
It's all in the handbook - The Youngest Child Handbook,
available in used book stores and tatoo parlors across the country.
Now at this point some responsible, well-educated,
hard-working first-born is saying to himself or to the other members
of his masonic organization, "that's not true.
I go into used
book stores frequently to look for rare first editions. I've never
seen this Youngest Child Handbook."
Meanwhile some middle is getting really pissed that his
younger sibling has been hiding this bit of information all this time
(on top of always eating the last of the left-over dessert each
night, and NEVER getting in trouble for it.)
Only children are just shrugging their shoulders and
saying, "This isn't about me? Who cares?"
While I have no response to the only child, and on
principle never say anything useful to a middle, I can deal with the
first-born's objection.
We hide the handbooks from you responsible types. We do
it so well that not a single one of the billions of first-borns
throughout the history of the planet has ever found one of our
handbooks.
How is this possible, you ask? While it's true that
first-borns are usually the CEOs of corporations, small used book
stores and tattoo parlors are frequently owned by youngests.
Even
those establishments that are not, are usually staffed by them. Now
that running away to the circus is less of an option than it was a
century ago, video game arcades, bowling alleys, tattoo parlors,
pizza delivery outlets and used book stores are the only places that
look to hire us youngests. Generations of doing balloon animals, amateur magic, and awesome air guitar have trained us youngests to
rapidly remove and hide
(some times up a sleeve,)
shelves of Youngest
Child Handbooks whenever a neatly coiffed first-born is spotted.
I bet that really bugs you superior control-freaks. I
don't mean that to sound harsh. We youngests generally love
first-borns. They take us in when Mom and Dad get tired of us, and
many youngests wouldn't even be here if first-borns hadn't kept
middles from smothering us in our cradles.
So what exactly is in the Youngest Child Handbook other
than ways of mooching off of first-borns and annoying middles? Just
the standard stuff about secret middle-of-the-night parties in
secluded woods with unicorn races and faerie dances.
Why else did you think we slept till noon?
"How come we don't get to ride unicorns and dance
with fairies?" complains the middle.
Like I said - it's all in the handbook.
And now - equal time for middles - their favorite saying.
Wally didn’t mean to keep people away. He liked people, but most
found him forbidding, stand-offish, and restrictive.
Maybe if I was made of field stone, thought Wally, or even decorative
brick.
Wally, as you may have guessed, was a wall. He wasn’t just any
wall. He was the 28 foot, razor-wired exterior wall to the
Murphysboro State Correctional Facility for Men, and in spite of
every attempt to look pleasant and friendly, people avoided Wally.
Maybe it was the three strategically placed sharpshooter towers. The
guards were not at all understanding when friendly inmates socially
scratched Wally’s mortar.
In spite of his isolation, Wally wasn’t bitter. He reflected the
gentle early morning sunshine into the exercise yard when the highly
violent inmates of C block lifted the weights and did their drug
deals. He blocked the harsher afternoon sun when the mob enforcers
of B block smoked their cigars and planned who needed to sleep with
the fishes.
The mobsters and murderers lives would have been far less pleasant if
it hadn’t been for Wally, but as he was off-limits, he had to
content himself with listening the inmate’s conversations.
“So, we got a movie tonight?”
“We did, and it was a good one, at least my kid liked it when they
showed it at Youth Correction.”
“Your ex-wife tell you that?”
“She might have if I hadn’t planted three nine-millimeter slugs
behind her right ear.”
“You know? The metric system ain’t as bad as people say.”
“You got that right.”
“It’ll be nice to have a good movie.”
“It’s a no go. Bubba smashed up the flat screen to make shivs
out of it for A block.”
“Why didn’t he ask me? I got a gross of ready-made shivs hiding
in my mattress!”
“Tough break.”
“Yeah, the marketplace is a jungle – hey, don’t they still have
that old projector?”
“Sure, they still got it, but Jerry’s blood is all over rec room
wall.”
“Ain’t it like Jerry to get in the way of a good time?”
“Yeah, if he weren’t in a coma, I’d…”
Wally stopped listening as an amazing thought occurred to him. My
surface doesn’t have any blood on it! No one leans on me, or
paints gang symbols on me, or anything. Once the sun goes down, all
these great guys could gather in the exercise yard and watch their
movie on me!
But there was one problem. Having no mouth, not to mention lungs,
diaphragm, or larynx, Wally couldn’t communicate with humans
whether they were guards or serial killers. Wally blocked harmful UV
radiation from Big Louie and South Side Gang as he contemplated his
problem – Wally was an accomplished mult-tasker.
Suddenly he heard a squawk. Wally looked for blood, but everyone in
the South Side Gang looked unpunctured.
“Stupid Wall,” said a voice. “What’s the big idea, putting
all this sharp stuff up here where folks are supposed to land?”
Wally followed the voice to the razor wire on top of him, and saw a
grey bird.
“Don’t move,” said Wally. Birds can hear walls – even ones
without a mouth. “That razor wire can hurt you.”
“I figured that out on my own, Blockhead.”
“If you stand still, I’ll get you out.” Wally shifted his
blocks, slightly stretching the wire in one spot, and opening a hole
in another. The bird jumped out of the wire and perched on Wally’s
central rifle tower.
“Thanks, Wall, you’re a pal,” said the bird. “Anything I can
do for you – just let me know.”
The bird must have thought it was unlikely that a wall would need a
favor – or maybe he was insincere in his offer because he was
already in flight before Wally could shout, “wait!”
“What now?” said the bird with less than perfect manners.
“I don’t want the mobsters and murderers to miss their movie,”
said Wally. “They could show it on my surface if they wait until
after sundown, but they don’t know that because humans can’t hear
me when I speak.”
“Yeah?” said the bird. “I can take care of that for you.”
“You can?”
“Sure. I’m Stoolie the Pigeon. Talking to the Warden is what I
do.”
So that night the inmates of Murphysboro State Correctional Facility
for Men got to watch their movie. There was less than the normal
amount of violence because Wally the Wall reflected the movie in all
its wonderful colors. (The sound was crappy, but Wally didn’t have
anything to do with that.)
And yes, the movie turned out to be Wall-E, but Wally didn’t think
the main character was any relation.
All I really know about the inside I learned from Richard Pryor and Gene Wilder. Warning - language.
