Change that will KILL you...

Naw...I'm not going off on a political rant. I'm really tired of all that bullshit and will be forever grateful when Tuesday has come and gone. Although, if you are of a mind to vote for Change because you think it might make a difference in your life, please know that the only change "The One" intends to leave you is a change of underwear. (If you're lucky) You see, I've been around long enough to know when somebody is peeing on my shoes and telling me it's raining.
Take that to the bank, if you still have one.

NO, what is pressing on my gourd today is life in general. Can you tell that I've just finished checking the obituaries? (It's always a good day when I'm not in there.)

As I scan the names and faces of the most recent planet departees, I find myself grading the duration of their respective "runs". I'll see a guy who pegged-out in his late seventies and think, "that seems like a good run" or, a woman who's odometer turned eighty-something and decide that "she can't complain". By the same token I lament the passing of folks who seem to have been given the bum's rush off the planet. There's something not right about receiving the ultimate short-change. You know...getting screwed!

What I have decided lately is that there is a situation that is actually worse than an early death. WAY worse. Sticking around passed your expiration date of seventy or eighty has got to be a special kind of hell. Why? It's simple, ...CHANGE. Change is the one thing that gets harder and harder to accept as the years roll by. It quite simply pisses us off. Seventy-five years is about all the change a man can handle and women, being way more tolerant, are able to put up with an additional five or ten more years of people "messing with stuff".

Think about it. When was the last time you knew who Don Pardo was talking about when he introduced the host of Saturday Night Live? Or, could even understand the name of this week's musical guest. Hell, Don's 90 now and I'm sure he doesn't know if he's wearing pants let alone who or what he's talking about. (Though I'm sure he's still cashing his checks.)

Face it. When was the last time you stayed up late enough to watch Saturday Night Live? I TIVO the damn thing and watch it at a more reasonable hour, but am beginning to wonder why I bother. It's just not that funny anymore. It has changed.

CHANGE, that's what kills us. A person can only accept so much of it and that is IT. "Get me out of here" syndrome begins to overtake us as the years roll by and the stupidity of the generations behind us becomes an unbelievably annoying burden.

Excuse me just a moment....

Hey, YOU KIDS GET OFF MY LAWN!!!!!

Have you gotten a load of the tattoos the whippersnappers are sporting?

When I was a kid, the only time you saw people with tattoos was when either a circus or carnival was in town. Now, in our age of enlightenment, body mutilation has become an accepted form of self expression. I'm guessing that next those snappy homemade prison tats will become all the rage as the younger demographic opts for more "realism" in their exterior decoration. These are, after all, the same clowns that popularized the "bed head" hair style.
According to the Pew Research Center, 36% of all 18-to-25 year-olds now have tattoos. Makes a parent proud doesn't it?

I just want to stick around long enough to see how all these tattooed hunks and honeys deal with their body art when sagging skin and dunes of cellulite turn some of those bitchin' tats into something resembling the Blue Ribbon eggplant at the Iowa State Fair.
OH...it'll happen.

You see, I have been very carefully buying stock in several companies that produce the lasers needed by plastic surgeons for the removal of unwanted tattoos. I'll be RICH! I'll be 90, but I'll be RICH!

Better put in my request for an additional ten years. There must be hundreds of expensive cigars and cases of whiskey with my name on them that will need taking care of.

Now, that's Change I can Believe In.

Let Me Talk to Ma Bell...Not "Nancy" from Mumbai

My wife smiles as she watches me try to keep it together. I am about an hour into a conversation regarding my e-mail account with the ever so helpful "Nancy" from- "Oh sir, please do not be asking me where I am located as I am not allowed to say.". She is polite to a fault, but my blood pressure is escalating rapidly as I struggle to understand the majority of what she is saying.

"Please sir, I am thanking you for your patience. I will have an answer for you in a moment. Please hold." If only she could see my face and hear the not so flattering suggestions I am making under my breath. WHY does it have to be so HARD????? We've had all this computer crap and high speed Internet access for years now and yet it seems like we're all doomed to the same type of problems that plagued early automobiles. It is not yet idiot proof!

What has prompted this, my second call, to the folks who used to be referred to as "Ma Bell"and were formerly located in a country where people actually talked like they were from "around here" is an e-mail that I have been finding in my in box for the past several days.

"We have noticed that you are accessing email using non-secure settings in your email software....blah blah blah"
It then wraps up by saying: "Please make the necessary changes immediately. Remember, you need to make these changes if you want to continue to send/receive email using a mail client."

"Nancy" is the second person I have spoken with in the last two days regarding this email. "Ben" had assured me that everything was taken care of and that I was "not to worry" less than 24 hours ago, yet I have just received another warning. All I am trying to determine is just what the hell they are talking about and how I can fix it. That's all! I have been using this email account for several years and wonder what has changed and what I need do to insure continued email service. Simple.

Perhaps it's all the excitement of their Chandrayaan-I moon shot from the Satish Dhawan Space Center that happened this week. (Oops, I may have said too much.) But, after a grand total of over three hours on the phone with "Nancy" and "Ben", neither they nor I have a clue regarding the purpose of my email notice about the security of my account. They both have assured me that I won't be getting that notice again and that I should not worry about having my email cut off.

Wait. Let me check.....

Yep, there it is again. Good work "Nancy" and "Ben"!
I guess I'll just continue to delete these notices until Ma Bell gets her head out of her ass or until...HELL BLOWS UP!

If you need me, I'll be in the garage...sitting in my car.
My car understands me.

Well, at least until it tries to send me an email.

In Supermarket Parking Lots...They were #1

The 1950's were tough for my dad. He was a TV holdout.
We were absolutely the LAST family in our neighborhood to get an idiot box.

"It'll ruin everybody!" "Kids won't play outside; won't get their homework done." They'll all be morons!" (As usual, you could take his prescience to the bank.)

Until he succumbed to the lure of televised baseball and the Friday Night Fights, (How are YOU fixed for blades by the way?), I had to practically live next door at the Chamberlain's house. They HAD TV and six kids...their very own peanut gallery. And, there I was every weekday afternoon huddled with the Chamberlains as we gazed at the TV test pattern waiting for the magic hour of 5 o'clock when we would hear the magic begin.

"HEY KIDS, WHAT TIME IS IT?" It was, as we all responded: "HOWDY DOODY TIME!"

Howdy, Buffalo Bob, Dilly Dally, Mr. Bluster, Clarabelle, Chief Thunder Thud and the always HOT Princess Tinka Tonka were a national show out of New York that every kid in America thought was just about the best damn thing they had ever seen. It was the cat's nuts and it was just for us.

Local broadcasters, never shy about copying success especially when it would allow them to pocket a couple jillionty dollars, were quick to get on board the kid train.
Local kiddie shows sprang up in nearly every metropolitan area large enough to support a TV station. Playing to the tykes was a GOLD MINE! Overnight, guys,( it was mostly guys), who were perhaps weathermen or TV engineers donned cowboy, clown or space cadet get-ups to entertain and sell stuff to the ever so coddled baby boomers. It was a classic scenario of local broadcast ner'- do- wells becoming very LARGE celebrity fish in dinky show biz ponds.

While it lasted, it was sweet.

In southern Michigan, Detroit spawned a huge stable of kid show hosts. I thought they were just about the biggest stars EVER and so did the Chamberlains and the rest of my gutter-snipe pals.

There was Soupy Sales on Channel 7, WXYZ. Soupy went on to greater fame at all the ABC owned and operated stations and enjoyed a long career. (The kids missed most of the innuendo on Soupy's shows, but the adults didn't and that produced jumbo ratings.)

There was also Johnny Ginger, Wixey, and Milky the Clown who didn't do much for me.




Milky and his loser friends





One of the best Detroit area kid show hosts was a guy named Ted Lloyd. Thanks to the Internet I just recently learned his name. (Hey, what's 50 or 60 years when it comes to finding out important information?) To me his name will always be Sagebrush Shorty.

"Here he comes ridin' into town again
It's Sagebrush...Sagebrush Shorty.
Here's Shorty NOW!"

Every time I heard that jingle I knew it was going to be a good time with Shorty. He had his little wooden pal, Bronco Billy Buttons, and a whole mess of really cool cartoons. It was kid heaven. I loved that show.


Thanks again to the Internet, I learned that Shorty left Detroit in 1965 and headed for L.A. where he mostly paid the bills by teaching ventriloquism until his death in 1999.
It made me sad to think that old Shorty was living just up the road from me in Southern California for all of those years and I never even knew it.

Sometime in the late 60's or early 70's the government got involved in children's television programing producing shows like Sesame Street and the Electric Company. They were, and I guess still are, good shows that kids enjoy. Why our tax dollars are helping to provide this entertainment is lost on me. It's just another example of the federal government getting into a business they don't understand...like maybe... banking. Oops.

With the assent of children's programming on public television, just as the blacksmiths and telegraph operators of the old West, the local commercial kiddie show hosts began to disappear. Today, like investment bankers, they are all gone.

Hey gang, how about a Popeye cartoon for old time sake??

Now, where's that cartoon machine?

Do we need a cartoon machine bailout?

October Means Great Timing

"Congratulations men. I am happy to report to you that this is the first Signal Officer Basic Course class that will NOT be going to Vietnam."


October has always been a magic month. The warm days and cool sleeping nights, not to mention the kaleidoscopic colors in the trees have long made it my absolute favorite month. There is something about the feel of the air and the cast of the Autumn shadows that lends itself to daydreams and reflections that are far away in other seasons.

It was thirty-seven years ago this month that an Army major came down to Fort Gordon, Georgia from the Pentagon to deliver the news that probably saved my life. I was just another freshly minted second lieutenant in the Signal Corps who was being made ready to command a forward area signal platoon in Southeast Asia. They went through a lot of us in those days. The job involved traveling with and setting up communications for the infantry in combat situations. In the case of Vietnam it meant that you and your men set up the radios and antennas on which "Charlie" zeroed his artillery and combined arms fire. Not a great job.

I was newly married and the father of a baby girl and had been walking around with 'Nam orders for several weeks when the major gave my group the news. I was relieved to know that by shear good timing I had been training at the perfect point to benefit from President Nixon's "Vietnamization of the war" efforts. In his attempt to show the American public that U.S. troops were turning more of the fighting over to the army of South Vietnam, he was slowly bringing home some of the Army and Marine Divisions stationed there. It was a ruse...and I was part of it. Nixon had decided to bring home both the Army's 1st Infantry and the 82nd Airborne Divisions in November. At least that's what he told the American public. What he was really doing was bringing home a small contingent, (Headquarters Company), from each division and moving the bulk of the remaining troops to other units still in country. The Army was to flesh out the 1st and the 82nd with new troops still in the United States. Tricky, but that's what Dick did.

Half of my class went to the 82nd Airborne Division, after first going to Jump School to prepare themselves for the task of falling out of perfectly good airplanes. I, mercifully, was in the group that was sent to the 1st Infantry Division which was being re-located to Fort Riley, Kansas. Another extremely lucky break. This meant that my Army career would involve lots of sleeping on the ground and trying not to shoot cattle on the dusty plain of Kansas as the division trained for its new role in support of NATO forces in Europe. ( It should be noted that no VietCong dared show their face during my tenure in the heart of America.)

It is said that "God looks out for drunks and fools". Since I was both in those days, perhaps I was doubly blessed. Whatever the case, each year about this time I reflect on the good fortune that came to me that particular October and appreciate even more what a grand stroke of luck it was.

Ask me anytime...

Favorite month?

October...hands down.

To Congress: Do the right thing...DIE!

Who would have ever considered that perhaps Nixon and Elvis would have made a great ticket?
Well, right now they are looking pretty damn good to me!

As I watch the car wreck that is our congress wrestle with the Frankenstein financial mess they created with their moronic oversight of Fanny, Freddy and the economy in general, I find myself torn between public execution and castration (where appropriate) as the punishment of choice. How about a Perp Walk for the sons o' bitches for starters!





Will the REAL congress please stand up...










"Everything is okey dokey." Barney Frank, Chris Dodd, Maxine Waters and the rest of the congressional criminals: 2003-2008

These clowns make what Ken Lay and company did to Enron look like a snatch and grab at the Circle K. And Lay, at least, had the decency to DIE.




Remember Uncle Billy from "It's a Wonderful Life"?




Where are Gabby and Roy when you need them?









Where is Sky King???



Where is Penny?
Oh, that's right. I have her tied up at the old line shack. (Never mind.)