Willow's 12th Birthday Will Be Busy!

 

by Pa Rock

Proud Grandpa

My youngest granddaughter, Willow Files, turns twelve years old today.  She lives in Oregon with her older brothers, Sebastian and Judah, and Pa Rock regrets that he does not get to see them very often.  I was in Oregon for a visit this past summer and was really surprised by how much Willow had changed since I had last seen her the previous summer.  She was enrolled in a fine arts summer camp and studying acting - and she was blossoming into quite an active young lady.

I spoke to Willow yesterday evening and learned, among other things, that she now has her own phone.  When Willow's mother was twelve she was obliged to share a phone with everyone else in her family, and that telephone was attached to the house with a wire - and had to stay in the house.  If Molly was in town and needed to use a phone, she had to find a special phone hooked to a line on the street.  It was called a "pay phone" and cost a quarter to operate for a very short period of time.  Egads!  

Times were rough back in the old days, Willow! 

I spoke with my Oregon granddaughter last night and she told me that instead of having a regular birthday party today, she will be going to school as usual and then taking a couple of her friends to a movie after school.  They will be watching "Trolls 3."  (I remember going to see the movie "Sing" with Willow and her brothers several years ago.  She sat next to me and hogged all the popcorn! - I still have a framed photo of us at that movie sitting on my desk.)

Willow is in the sixth grade and enjoys school.  She said that one of her favorite classes in "STEM" Science where the students are currently designing and building artificial legs.  What an interesting project that would be!  (Sixth graders are obviously much smarter today than they were back in my day!)   She also enjoys PE where her class is learning the fundamentals of volleyball.  Willow reports that she makes all A's and B's in her school work.

Happy birthday, Willow - and have a rocking good time at "Trolls 3"!   Pa Rock misses you and wishes you the best birthday ever!

Rocky G. Fraud

 

by Pa Rock

American Consumer

I live at what must be a very critical location on the rural roads, deer trails, and dog paths that crisscross the Ozarks of southern Missouri.  My house is almost the very first one serviced by the trash man on Monday mornings, a fact which guarantees that I begin each workweek lugging bags of trash out to the edge of the road in the dark.  But the trash man runs the hills and hollers in a different pattern than the mail lady, who gets to my house near the end of her work day - which means that I am often walking out to the mail box in the dark to check and see if the mail has finally arrived.  Even without any livestock, catching a few extra winks of sleep has its challenges at Rock's Roost.

But the mail came early yesterday - or perhaps the assortment of envelopes that I pulled from the mailbox in the afternoon was delivered late the previous night and I had just forgotten to trudge outside in the cold and dark to retrieve them.  Anyway, it was nice to find mail in the mailbox during daylight hours.

  

I sorted through the five or six items on the way back to the house and was not surprised to find that all but one were "begs"from politicians and charities, a papered supplement to the hundreds of "begs" that were flooding my email inbox at the same time due to the fact that it was "Bloodsucking Tuesday" or some other clever follow-up to "Black Friday" and "Cyber Monday."  It was a long walk from my mailbox out by the road to the trashcan in my kitchen, but I pushed on knowing that I would get there eventually.

The one item that did not appear to be a beg, or at least a common beg, was from my credit card company.   The window on the front of the envelope revealed that the material enclosed was for a person at my home address, but that person was identified as "Rocky G. Fraud."  I knew as I entered the house that instead of ripping up this particular piece of junk mail and depositing it in the trash unread, as I generally do with the majority of correspondence that I receive, that I would instead be reading the one addressed to "Rocky G. Fraud," which was more than likely just a clever ruse to get me to open their advertisement anyway.

My credit card company probably doesn't like me.  I pay for as many purchases as I can each month with a credit card.  (Some vendors now charge a fee if a buyer wishes to use a credit card, but I don't succumb to extortion.)  My credit card company doesn't charge a fee and expects to make more than its share of obscene profits off of the sky-high interest that it charges on monthly balances.  But I dutifully pay my complete balance every month and therefore operate my card essentially free.  Then at the end of every year I cash in my rewards points and bank that.  Merry Christmas!

Maybe, to their way of thinking, I am a fraudster - using their service to make money!

The unmitigated gall of that hillbilly crook!

So I opened the envelope from my credit card company yesterday, the one addressed to "Rocky G. Fraud," and found that it was an advertisement for a "fixed-rate personal loan."  

I don't know whether to feel insulted or not, but one thing I do know is that I don't need their loan.  I will be charging my Christmas gifts this year, and then paying the bill with the credit card company's own money - just as I have done for years.

Happy holidays from Rocky G. Fraud and the good people who "give" him credit and then pay him to take it!

Trump Rages that He is not Mentally Impaired

 

by Pa Rock

Citizen Journalist

Cognitive impairment is such a polite term, one that literally smacks of political correctness - and we all know how much certain Republicans hate to be seen as being "politically correct."  But that's just where their gasping, wheezing, and diapered leader went yesterday when he took to his own "Truth Social" to rage that he was not, despite all evidence to the contrary, cognitively impaired.

That's right.  Donald John Trump, a man who was once "elected" to the presidency of this country by a significant minority of American voters and who is now an overly-ripe seventy-seven years of old age, felt the need to go on social media and defend his almost steady stream of gaffes as just being bits of clever sarcasm.  (There are many things that Americans have come to expect from Trump, but generally "cleverness" is not one of them!)

Suggestions that Trump is cognitively impaired are not new.   According to Trump himself, he asked his doctor more than three years ago, in 2020, if there was "some sort of cognitive test" that he could take "to shut these people up."  He said the doctor gave him a test containing 30 or 35 questions which he "aced."  We can all take Trump's word for that because his truthiness is legendary!  (Now that's sarcasm!)

Some of the current criticism being shed on Donald Trump's mental acumen centers on the fact that he gets confused with names - such as referring to President Biden as Obama - and has shown confusion among significant events in history such as intermingling references to the First and Second World Wars (neither of which featured uniformed service by any members of his family on either side of the conflicts).  And while some see Trump's confusion with names and historical events as being evidence that he operates in a mental fog, Donald credits it all to cleverness on his part.  He says his gaffes are intentional and intended to make his point more indelible through his adroit use of sarcasm.

And while few would doubt Trump's penchant for being sarcastic, sometimes to the point of cruelty, his current  gaffes tend to sound eerily authentic.  

Donald Trump should settle for being referred to as "cognitively impaired" because there are other, less politically correct ways of saying the same thing, ones which his followers might actually understand.

Not every elderly person operates in a mental fog, but some do.

Vampires, and Werewolves, and Ghosts - Oh, My!

 

by Pa Rock

Television Junkie

As I sit typing at my living room window before daylight on a Monday morning, watching last night's full moon slowly descend toward the horizon, I am put in mind of a old British television show that I have recently begun streaming.  

Being Human ran for five seasons from 2008 until 2013 and had a total of  37 one-hour episodes.  It was classified by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) as a comedy/drama and was of such a good quality that American producers promptly stole the concept and came up with a version of the same name on this side of the pond.

(Many hit American television series had their roots in British television.  Shameless, The Office, and Queer as Folk are three examples.)

Though I have not seen any episodes of the American series, the plot lines appear to be identical.  In both versions a vampire and his friend, a werewolf, decide to rent an apartment in an attempt to become more like ordinary humans, but after moving into their new shared quarters they find that their living space is already occupied by the ghost of a previous tenant.  And while that sounds fairly hokey, or at least like the set-up for a dumb joke, it actually works quite well as a plot device, at least in the British version of the series.

The British version has George, a young man who had been non-fatally injured by a werewolf several months earlier and then developed into one himself, being befriended by Mitchell, a workmate at a hospital in Bristol, who was "turned" following an attack by a vampire a hundred years earlier during World War I.  The two men form a bond of friendship and decide to find a flat together where they can work at controlling the urges that continually pull them toward the dark side.  As they are moving into their new digs, they encounter Annie, the ghost of a young woman who was a previous tenant of the same apartment and who died there when she accidentally (?) fell down the stairs.

None of the young actors in the lead roles are household names, but they all should be.  (I did recently see Russell Tovey, the actor who portrays the werewolf, George, in the initial episode of John LeCarre's "The Night Manager," on Prime.)    Mitchell, the vampire, is played Aidan Turner, and Lenora Crichlow is Annie, the ghost.  The acting is first-rate and the principal players use their talents to make a fantastical situation into a tense, exciting, and very believable drama.  Tovey's werewolf, George, in particular, is very angst-riddled and often confused about what he expects from humanity, and his passionate pronouncements do much to create and sustain the show's believability. 

There is a great deal of violence featured in this series, as should be expected with tales involving a hungry vampire, a wolf-human who loses total control each time a full moon crosses the night sky, which is at least once per episode  - and who has trouble keeping his clothes on, and a confused and often angry ghost.    So Being Human may not be a show that the entire family would be comfortable watching together, but it is one that discerning viewers should check out and would likely enjoy - especially if their tastes run toward vampires, and werewolves, and ghosts.

Oh, my!

Missouri GOP Governor Goes Pardon Happy

 

by Pa Rock

Proud Missourian

This week I came across a news story on the internet that had me questioning the efficacy of my meds. Missouri's troglodyte governor, a former rural county sheriff - and a Republican, of course - by the name of Mike Parson was pardoning felons and past felons at an alarming rate, one not seen since World War  II.  I did mention that Parson is a Republican, didn't I?   The party that routinely stuffs the poor and members of racial minority groups into dark prison holes where they tend to disappear for generations.

Over the past three years Missouri Governor Mike Parson has granted official forgiveness or some form of legal exoneration to over six hundred duly convicted Missouri criminals.  A cantankerous old coffee shop clodhopper from the rural midwest who had spent more that a dozen years locking up bad guys was now throwing open cell doors and letting them go as fast as the jailers could throw open the cell doors!  

Perhaps it wasn't my meds that were the issue, but rather those which were sitting on the governor's nightstand.  WT actual F?

So I did some internet digging and came across the same information from multiple sources.  Governor Parson, it seems, had taken his power to pardon seriously, and he had set up a system for reviewing the cases of prisoners and former prisoners who applied for official forgiveness of their trespasses against society.

Missouri screens clemency requests trough the state's Board of Probation and Parole.   That agency then makes confidential recommendations to the governor who is free to act (or not) as he chooses.   When Parson became governor after the sudden resignation of his creep predecessor, there were 3,700 cases pending in which clemency had been requested.  Instead of leaving all of that paperwork stuffed in a file cabinet in some state office basement, Parson had his staff begin a systematic review of the clemency applications with a goal of carefully studying at least one hundred of them every month.  Many did not rise to the level that Parson and his staff saw as necessary for a pardon or a commutation, but others did - and the governor, much to his credit and my surprise - then took action!

Mike Parson is still not an icon of the progressive left, but on the issue of pardons and official forgiveness, he does seem to be surprisingly awake at the wheel!

Good work, Mike, and I wouldn't say it if I didn't mean it!

Headache

 

by Pa Rock

Chronic Complainer

For the past several days I have been dealing with a toothache, a rare circumstance for me because my old teeth are in relatively good order, but yesterday my dental situation seemed to transmogrify into a headache, and it just will not go away.  Last night when the tooth (or teeth) seemed to relent for awhile and allow a bit of sleep, the pounding headache would rush in and seize center stage.

It's probably all just stuff rooted in old age, but it's no damned fun regardless.

If this raging headache isn't tooth-related, it may be due to the fact that I have new glasses.  I probably made that situation worse yesterday when I self-diagnosed my vision issues as the possible culprit and abruptly changed back to my old pair of glasses.  Both pairs appear to work fine to my very old eyes - at least as far as I can see.  The issue might also be a product of the many hours that I spend staring into a computer screen - such as I am doing now on a Saturday morning before daylight.

Or it could have something to do with the recent drop in the temperature.  I dress warmly when I go outside - from the waist up, but instead of wearing long pants or blue jeans, all of which I have trouble holding up as I move around, I continue to wear drawstring shorts which fit snugly and stay up well.  Maybe my insufferable headache is a harbinger of pneumonia. 

Time will tell, I suppose - if I am around to hear it.

Over the past couple of days I have put a sizable dent in my supply of Ibuprofen, though I can't tell that it's made any difference in the pain level that is pounding through my skull.  My only other ready medical option is oxycodone.  I have four tablets left over from some long-forgotten malady that confronted me in October of 2015.   Do oxycodone tablets, like humans, have "use-by" dates?

Perhaps I should head out the the creek this afternoon and take one of those "polar plunges."  It probably wouldn't help with my headache, but it might fool the press into believing that I was still young enough to be President.  But, no.  If it's a choice between this headache or that one, I believe I will stick with the one I already have!

I don't think that I am at the end of my rope, though it has been uncoiling faster than usual as of late.  I still have my obituary to write and a few final bequests to get organized, and the magnum opus that I have been banging on for many months remains only about two-thirds complete.  (The second murderer has been so crafty that not even I know who he or she is at this point!)

So my bags aren't packed and I'm not ready to go.  That garbage scowl waiting to ferry me across the River Styx will have to keep waiting because this old fool still has crap to complete - if he could only shake this damned headache!

Until I free myself of this medical megillah, the lights at The Roost will be dimmed, the racket subdued, and I will attempt to ignore all of that which preys on my conscience.

Maybe you should, too.

Peace out!

Rosalynn Carter

 

by Pa Rock

Citizen Journalist

The United States lost one of its very best people last Sunday with the passing of former First Lady Rosalynn Carter who died at her home in Plains, Georgia, at the age of ninety-six.   Mrs. Carter had recently been diagnosed with dementia, and had, only a couple of days before her death, entered hospice care at her home.  She  died peacefully with her husband of seventy-seven years, former President Jimmy Carter, and members of their family at her side.

Rosalynn Carter was active in her husband's political life and his presidency.   She was a powerful member of President Carter's inner circle and was known for sitting in on his cabinet meetings.  The amount of influence that she had during the four years of the Carter presidency was historic.  But Rosalynn Carter, like her husband, stayed active on the world stage for decades after the end of the Carter presidency.  Together she and Jimmy built houses for the poor, worked tirelessly to stop the spread of disease and hunger around the globe, monitored international elections to insure that democracy prevailed, and did so much to bring relief and hope to millions.  Rosalynn was also a determined advocate for making mental health treatment available to the masses.

She was not a political poster of a wife who prattled on in silly soundbites about things she didn't really understand.  Rosalynn Carter was an active partner of a United States President, and together they rolled up their sleeves and worked tirelessly to make not only America, but the entire world, a better place for everyone.

Rosalynn Carter has finally stopped to rest, but her memory will march on. May the spirit of joyous humanity that she inspired outlive us all and grow brighter through the ages.   

We are so fortunate to have had Rosalynn Carter walk among us.

Hunting Feral Hogs from Hot Air Balloons

 

by Pa Rock

Citizen Journalist

The National Rifle Association (NRA) likes to clutch its pearls and panties and fine Italian suits as it whines on, ad infinitum, about America's long and proud history of hunting wildlife - with guns.  And since today is Thanksgiving, and because the earliest Thanksgiving feasts in America undoubtedly featured plenty of freshly killed wild game, I thought that a blog about hunting might be appropriate.

Last night I was reading a story on the internet about "super pigs," the by-product of feral swine in Canada who have maliciously cross-bred with domestic pigs and are now roaming the prairie provinces of Canada doing great damage to the land and attitudes of our Canadian cousins.  These "super pigs" are spreading across the prairies in large herds (or "sounders") and increasing in numbers despite efforts to keep them in check through hunting, trapping, and poisonings.    Now, after ravaging large swaths of the prairie provinces of Alberta, Manitoba, and Saskatchewan, many of the sounders seem to be turning south and heading toward the grasslands of Montana, the Dakotas, and even Minnesota.

The article that I read referred to the incoming hordes of feral pigs as the current most invasive species of animals moving across the planet.

I am not a hunter, but I know there are already problems with feral swine here in the United States.  My own state of Missouri has had issues with wild pigs over the years, and they have been a major concern in Arkansas, just to the south.  A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the increasing presence of wild javelinas in the desert communities of Arizona and some of the western states, and while javelinas are not technically swine, they are closely enough related to hogs to be recognized as such.   Wild pigs can pose a direct danger to human life and well-being through their aggressive foraging for food, and they also spread disease among wild and domestic animal populations.

The article that I was reading about the "super pigs" coming down from Canada mentioned efforts to control their numbers and the spread of their populations, things like hunting, traps, and even poisons.  But it was just one small sentence in that section of the article that really jumped out and caught my attention.  Texas, it seems, has passed a law which permits the hunting of wild pigs from hot air balloons!

When I read that my mind immediately circled back to the old news stories of Sarah Palin hunting wolves from helicopters.  Somehow, it did not sound very sportsmanlike, or safe.  So I took that statement about the law in Texas which allows hunting wild pigs from hot air balloons, and did a bit of research.  It turns out that while the statement is true, in practice that type of hunting only happens rarely, if at all.

The Texas legislature, which seems to believe that every Texan has a right to carry guns anywhere he or she damned well pleases, did pass a law in 2017 which permitted individuals to hunt hogs and coyotes from hot air balloons.  Legislators were apparently most concerned about the burgeoning numbers of feral hogs that were roaming the Texas prairies in search of food, and they saw hunting from balloons as one more way to help curb the menace that nature had inflicted upon the Lone Star State.

But there were - and are - problems with an airborne assault on marauding pigs.  First of all, people who insure hot air balloons did not want the added liability of firearms being carried aboard the balloons - and fired from the balloons.  Also, it turns out that hot air balloons do not make the best of hunting platforms because they bob and weave and vibrate in the wind - and they go where the wind takes them rather than where the game is necessarily headed.   If the sounder of hogs goes one way, and the balloon goes the other, oh well!  And then what happens if the hunter gets incredibly lucky and actually kills a hog from a thousand feet in the air?  How does he or she claim their trophy?  Or does the carcass just lay on the ground and rot - or serve as food for the other hungry hogs?

The Texas law was not very well thought out, and is apparently seldom used, but, no matter, pig-headed Texans are keeping it on the books anyway.   During another Trump administration it might even get incorporated into their border security program!

Happy Thanksgiving - and God bless the earliest Americans who gave our ancestors sanctuary! 

Sixty Years Have Flown By

 

by Pa Rock

Time Traveler

Time really does go by faster as we age.  I don't understand the physics of it, but I am living the phenomenon and know it to be true.

John Kennedy, a President of the United States whom a few of us can still  remember, was killed sixty years ago today, and yet it wasn't sixty years ago but rather just weeks ago, or perhaps days even.  Time has rushed by at an alarming speed, and in mere moments we, too, will be gone, lying peacefully in a darkened box beneath a cold tombstone without even the flickering of an eternal flame for light and warmth.

Back in the day in my little hometown, the place I wrote about yesterday, the school lunch period was an actual hour in length, and any student who lived close to the school could walk home for lunch.  Some, those with money in their pockets, could even walk down onto Main Street and order a hamburger or hotdog fresh off of the grill at one of the local drug stores.  (That was a full decade before Walmart began decimating America's Main Streets and turning once proud family businesses into flea markets.)

I was a sophomore and had just finished a school lunch (which was 25 cents) and been out exploring with some of my friends when the bell rang to summon us back to class on that November Friday sixty years ago.  My after lunch "class" was a study hall in the biggest classroom in the little school, a room which also contained our small school library.  I was sitting in there doing some homework - or, more likely reading an encyclopedia (remember those?), when an older friend walked in and announced that while he had been home having lunch, there was an announcement on television that President Kennedy had been shot.  We had no school intercom for news updates, but a few teachers circulated through the building for the remainder of the afternoon relating what they had heard on the radio in the office.  Late in the day there was an all-school assembly where the superintendent got up and announced that the President was dead and that the country now had a new President.

It was shocking, and sad, and a day that most people could never forget.  John Kennedy was shot and killed in Dallas, Texas, sixty years ago today, but it feels like yesterday.  Where the heck has all of that time gone?

No Luck in the Muck

 

by Pa Rock

Man with a Trowel

Alas, Ranger Bob and I returned from our adventure to the wilds of McDonald County yesterday empty-handed.  It was a long and difficult day, much of it spent in chilly and rainy conditions, but my old college roommate and I had fun catching as we searched in vain for a time capsule that I buried in McDonald County roughly sixty years ago.   Sadly, the capsule, an old Mason jar, remains buried somewhere beneath the surface of a rough patch of land overlooking the Elk River a few miles north of Noel, Missouri.  

I left West Plains at 7:00 a.m. yesterday and headed west for a hundred miles where I picked up Bob at his home in Springfield.  It had been raining off-and-on the preceding night, and the rain was continuing as we  drove on southwest for another hundred miles to McDonald County, Missouri, the southwest corner county in the state.  We arrived at our destination about 11:00 a.m.  

We had brought some dry clothes, a couple of garden trowels, a small digging shovel, and a metal detector which I had purchased new for the dig.  Unfortunately I had not done my homework and practiced with the metal detector, so I asked Bob to study the instruction booklet while I drove us to our destination.

The place where we were heading was an old set of tourist cabins that my parents bought in 1958 and where I lived from age ten to sixteen.  It had been called Riverview Court and it sat next to the well known resort of that era, Ginger Blue Lodge, where our little eight-unit court caught some of the overflow crowd from Ginger Blue.  Those were great years and my sister and I were fortunate to have lived there during that Noel's tourist heyday.   Today the area has many  "vacation rentals," along with campgrounds and places that rent canoes and kayaks for floats on the Elk River.

Riverview Court no longer exists, but some of the original buildings have been. modified and are still on-site.  The area where I had buried the time capsule back in the early 1960's was back behind the old home and office, and in behind the small building which contained the wringer washer and rinse tubs that we used to wash the motel's bed linens and towels.  But that building and the old garage which also sat behind the house had been torn down over the years, so I had to try and visualize things as they had been in order to know roughly where the capsule would be.  The area where we wound up digging now has RV-hookups. We got several pings on the metal detector and did a lot of close-in hand-digging, but never came up with what we were after.  In fact, as Bob noted later, we actually never unearthed anything made of metal at all.

The weather was yucky and the ground was mucky, and the vessel from yesterday remains hidden.

Ranger Bob was a life-saver, not only because he did most of the work, but when I was on my hands and knees digging with the trowel and finally gave up, I discovered that I could not stand.  It took some major work on his part, but finally Bob managed to get me upright and on my feet,  If he hadn't been there, I would still be crawling east today!

After finally giving up the quest, we drove into Noel and looked around for a bit before enjoying an interesting lunch at what used the be the town's old Dari-Lane.  I didn't see a person that I knew from the many years that I lived there, nor did I expect to.

Riverview Court and Noel had changed, and some of that was disappointing, but it had been a day well spent with a good friend, and I was glad that I had managed to once again touch base with the little town that has been such an important part of my life, even if big chunks of it were almost unrecognizable to me now.  I talked to my sister on the phone as I drove home and told her how much things had changed, and she replied that it was true, and then reminded me of the old adage, "You cannot go home again."

I returned to my West Plains home just at dark after 420 miles on the road, and Rosie, who had been home alone most of the day, was most pleased to see me!  Unlike Noel, she had not changed at all!

(Thanks for tripping with me, Ranger Bob.  It's always great to see you and Sandy.)

The Quest

 

by Pa Rock

Man with a Shovel

My good friend, Ranger Bob, and I are off on a quest today searching for a time capsule that I buried sixty years ago in McDonald County, Missouri.  The capsule, which is actually a fruit jar with a metal lid, contains some coins, a few other items which have faded from my old, gray memory, and a list of predictions.  
 
I know that the building I used as a landmark to find the capsule has since been torn down, so I bought a metal detector especially for this search.  I am also taking a large magnet and plenty of warm clothing – it is supposed to rain.
 
It will be fun searching for the buried relic from my loud and wasted youth, and I know that I will enjoy spending the day with my old college roommate.   Please check back in this space tomorrow to hear about our success – or not.
 
(Note:  When traveling to McDonald County, it is always best to go in pairs because somebody has to get out of the car and open the gates!)

Those Thieving Gen-Zers

 

by Pa Rock

Paying Customer

Back in late October I posted a piece in this space entitled "Aldi's is on the Highway to Hell!" in which I pissed and moaned over the fact that my local Aldi's market has recently installed six of those awful self-checkout systems, and now has (usually) one lonesome human also running a checkout line for technology-resistant fellow humans.  I am opposed to self-checkouts because they deny jobs to hard-working people who need and want the dignity afforded regular employment.  The self-checkouts at my local Aldi's are enjoying brisk use, and the local economy suffers because of them.  

Although I haven't set foot inside of a Walmart for over thirty years, I understand from people who still shop there that Walmart has also begun using the job-stealing devices.   That's not surprising for Walmart which has never had a reputation for being employee-friendly, but it is disappointing when it comes to Aldi's.

But, that was last month's news.  This month there is still more buzz generating about the self-checkout revolution, and not all of it is praiseworthy.  The loan marketplace Lending Tree has recently released a study based on the results of a survey of  2,000 US consumers between the ages of eighteen and seventy-five.   According to the results of that survey, 31% (nearly one in three) Gen-Zers (those in the survey from age eighteen to twenty-six) have stolen items while going through the self-checkouts - compared to 15% of shoppers of any age who admitted the same crime.  

Almost a third of young people steal through the self-checkout kiosks, and to make matters even more stark for business owners, 44% of those say they plan to continue doing it - and 37% say they would do it to save money on groceries or healthcare products.

So it all boils down to basic math.  Does a store save more by adding self-checkout kiosks and eliminating salaries compared to the amount of money it loses through increased five-finger discounts at those same kiosks?   The thievery apparently reached such a high level in New Mexico that Walmart began removing the self-checkouts from some of its stores.   Other businesses report that they are keeping the machines but adding extra-security personnel to watch them - so perhaps self-checkouts can create jobs after all!

Sometimes picking the pockets of American workers can have a downside!

Sarah Huckabee Sanders has a Hog Party

 

by Pa Rock

Citizen Journalist

The Arkansas Times reported this week on a party that was held at the state's Governor's Mansion on September 1st, the night before the Arkansas Razorbacks kicked off their 2023-24 football season.  Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders dubbed her expansive and expensive outdoor soiree "the Undefeated Party!"  By all reports it was a heck of a fine time, paid for on the taxpayers' dime, and accessible  by invitation only.

According to the article in the Times, the party featured in addition to the governor, who was wearing red shorts in the style of a cheerleader, Sam Pittman, the head coach of the Arkansas Razorback football team (or in common parlance,  "the hogs"), three costumed mascots from the university, the U of A cheerleading squad and the school's dance team, and the brass section of the university's marching band.  It is not clear from the article whether members of the football team were invited, and none with pictured  in the official photo that accompanied the piece in the newspaper.

The big story related to Sarah's shindig was its cost, at least $13,081.36, which was footed by the hardworking taxpayers of Arkansas.   While there were no apparent purchases  from Arkansas business giants Walmart and Tyson Foods, listed in the article in the Arkansas Times, there was an acquisition of almost $1,500 worth of gingham-checked tablecloths from Amazon.com, a major rival of Walmart.  The food purchases came in at nearly $4,500, and there was an interesting expenditure of $449.88 for six hundred buttons, half of which said "Best Coach, Best Gov, Best State" a slogan that sounded almost like a political advertisement.

But it was a party, so what the heck!

Arkansas won their first game of the season on the following day, despite pre-game "boos" directed toward the governor and her husband by fans in the stands.  But the story of Sarah's elegant new $19,000 podium broke two weeks later on September 15th, and the following day the Razorbacks had their first loss in what would become a six-game losing streak - or as the Arkansas Times put it, ". . . hardly an outcome that would justify spending $13,000+ of other people's money."

But don't let the whiners get you down, Sarah.  Arkansas has plenty of money, so party on!

Woo Pig Suey!

Horse on a Plane

 

by Pa Rock

Flying Fool

This is a subject that I have written about on a couple of previous occasions.  It is a literary device, actually:  a tale of ordinary people who suddenly find themselves trapped in dangerous circumstances.

Samuel L. Jackson starred in an action movie in 2006 that was titled "Snakes on a Plane," an extremely descriptive title that told potential ticket purchasers all they really needed to know about the movie.  Either they would be up for it, or they wouldn't.  

At the time of that movie's release, I envisioned all sorts of scary sequels:  pigs on a plane, rats on a plane, unsupervised three-year-olds on a plane.  The list of horrors was limited only by one's imagination.  (Bees on a plane, anyone?)   But the idea did not seem to catch fire like I thought it would, and it was only after a full decade had passed (2016) that the next really good horror film involving public transportation was released.  That was the Korean masterpiece, "Train to Busan," about a passenger train from Seoul to the Korean coastal city of Busan.  Unfortunately for the passengers, but to the delight of many members of the audience, a freaking zombie managed to hop aboard the train just as it was leaving the station in Seoul for the nonstop trip of three or four hours to Busan.    By the time the train finally neared its destination, many of the passengers had been bitten and turned into zombies.

("Train to Busan" won many important industry accolades and did result in a sequel.  I had ridden the same train several years earlier, but had traveled on a day when the zombies all apparently had other places to be!)

I used this space in April of 2017 to tell about an incident aboard a United Airlines flight from Houston to Calgary where a scorpion dropped from an overhead bin onto the head of a Canadian business class passenger and eventually wound up stinging the poor traveler.  And then, two years after that in 2019, I also blogged about a bat that suddenly appeared and began flying about in a Spirit Airlines plane that was traveling from Charlotte to Newark.  Most of the passengers were in a state of panic, but at least one was busy filming the mayhem with his cell phone and then posting it to social media.

Comedian Stephen Colbert had this to say about the "bat" incident:   "I can't believe there was a bat on a Spirit Airlines flight.  I've only ever seen raccoons!"

Over the past week there was yet another incident involving a member of the animal kingdom misbehaving in a flying contraption.  A Boeing 747 (a damned big plane) chartered by Air Atlanta Icelandic had just taken off from JFK International Airport in New York City and was enroute to Liege, Belgium, when a horse that was being transported in the cargo hold somehow managed to break free of its transportation crate at 30,000 feet.  Workers onboard the plane were unable to regain control of the frightened animal, and the pilots had to radio JFK and request permission to return to the airport.  As a part of the process, twenty tons of fuel had to be dumped in the Atlantic Ocean just west of Martha's Vineyard, the same posh island where Florida Governor Ron DeSantis had dumped fifty Venezuelan migrants just over a year earlier.

The flight to Belgium was postponed and completed on the following day.

The airlines' (and the government's) answer to all of this high-flying mayhem seems to be to cram even more humans onto every plane.  Perhaps when we each have someone sitting on our laps, the dangers of stings, bites, and getting trampled to death won't seem as real.

Happy trails!

Bill Gates Looks Five Years into the Future

 

by Pa Rock

Citizen Journalist

(Note:  I am a subscriber to "Gates Notes," the fairly regular blog of Microsoft founder and philanthropist zillionaire Bill Gates, and I find his knowledge, musings, and insights on many subjects to be so compelling that I would probably cough up the money for a paid subscription if that was the only way that I could read what he has to say.  Fortunately for my budget, "Gates Notes" is currently free.)

In a blog posting that came out a week ago today, the co-founder of Microsoft and its former CEO predicted, with the air of complete certainty, the next big thing in personal computing.  Gates said that within five years instead of bouncing around between programs and "apps," each computer user will have a personal "agent" embedded in their computer which will, based on voice requests from the user, move seamlessly form one function to another.  Gates said that he has been thinking - and writing - about the concept of personal agents in computing for years, but that the goal had only become attainable with the recent major advances in the field of artificial intelligence.

As the multi-billionaire put it:

"In the next five years, this will change completely. You won’t have to use different apps for different tasks. You’ll simply tell your device, in everyday language, what you want to do. And depending on how much information you choose to share with it, the software will be able to respond personally because it will have a rich understanding of your life. In the near future, anyone who’s online will be able to have a personal assistant powered by artificial intelligence that’s far beyond today’s technology."

That may sound a bit scary to those who value the simple things in life, like privacy, but for those like me who are in a mad rush to get things done before last call, it comes across as convenient as hell.  And for the lonely and neglected, it will be one more friend to share the day with:  first Siri, and then Alexa, and now . . .  and now . . . drat!  I haven't even named the cat yet and he's been stopping by for breakfast for over three years now!

Thanks for the update, Bill, and the heads-up.  Alexa and I are both eager to meet our new agent!

And so is Rosie!

Fight Club Comes to Congress

 

by Pa Rock

Citizen Journalist

A couple of days ago I wrote about the new low bar in the national GOP when it comes to offensive speech.  In more civil times politicians would have been very careful with their use of pejorative language - words like "scum" and "whore' - when publicly describing their political opponents, but now shock language seems to be the new normal, especially among Republicans who are trying to stand out in the vulgar wake of Donald John Trump.  The elderly and morbidly obese ex-president is, of course, the one who has ushered in this new age of incivility through his penchant for saying whatever he wants, whenever he wants.  

But not only are Trump-worshiping GOP politicians beginning to talk like Trump, they are also starting to act like him.    While the loud and vulgar politician never gets his own tiny hands dirty - or bruised - he is not bashful about inciting others to become physical.  (January 6th, 2021, is just one example.)   

Yesterday there were two extremely shameful incidents in the US Capitol in which Republican politicians bullied, and in one case, injured, others.  In the first instance Rep. Tim Burchett of Tennessee was walking down a hallway in the Capitol giving an interview to NPR reporter Claudia Grisales when former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy and members of his security detail walked by heading the other direction.  After McCarthy passed, the Tennessee congressman suddenly bent forward and stepped toward the reporter causing her the think that he had been shoved, perhaps as a joke.

But it wasn't a joke.   Burchettt, who had been one of the eight Republicans who had brought about McCarthy's removal as House Speaker, said that McCarthy had elbowed him in the back (a "sucker punch" to the kidneys) as he had walked by.  Burchett chased McCarthy down the hallway and confronted him, but the former Speaker denied the assault.  Burchett told his account of the incident to several news outlets yesterday, and Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida, the congressman who brought the original motion to remove McCarthy from the speakership, filed a formal complaint with the House Ethics Committee on Congressman Burchett's behalf.

And then the unfiltered Republican machismo showed up in a Senate hearing later in the day when Sean M. O'Brien, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters General President, was speaking at a meeting titled "Standing Up Against Corporate Greed:  How Unions are Improving the Lives of Working Families."  US Senator Markwayne Mullin from Oklahoma, a man with a propensity to get his own way, was present at that meeting as he had been at another senate hearing last March when the teamsters President had also spoken.  At the March meeting Senator Mullin had told the Teamster official to "Shut your mouth."  In the interim since the March encounter they had also exchanged comments and insults over Twitter.

But yesterday it went beyond insults when Senator Mullin challenged President O'Brien to a fight.  A back-and-forth dialogue developed and finally came to a head when the senator told the teamster, "You want to run your mouth?  We can be to consenting adults and finish it here."  To which Sean O'Brien replied, "Okay, that's fine, perfect.  I'd love to do it right now."  The senator then countered with "Then stand your butt up then!"  which brought a response from the teamster of "You stand your butt up."

And then Senator Mullin, who was jacketless and looked as though he had come prepared for a tough-guy photo-op, stood up.

A major crisis was averted when 82-year-old Senator Bernie Sanders, the chair of the committee, interceded and reminding the headstrong Mullin of his position.  "No, no, sit down.   Sit down!"  Sanders shouted.  "You are a United States Senator!"

Yes he is.  A United States Senator who sees bullying and trying to capture the spirit of Donald Trump as the way to move the political dial in America.  Of course, trying to bully a teamster official may not be the smartest way to prove your manhood.  

Politics in America is in the gutter, and Donald John Trump is the person primarily responsible for putting it there.  Trump likes to roar about "human scum," "vermin,' and "traitors," and those elements of society do exist - but by-and-large they rode in on his coattails!  

Congress should be populated by bright and thoughtful leaders who are committed to protecting our nation and moving it forward, and it should not be under the domination of loud-mouthed thugs who think they've died and gone to Fight Club!

Just sayin . . . 

King Charles at Three-Quarters of a Century

 

by Pa Rock

Septuagenarian

King Charles III is having a birthday today.  The still-working father of two and grandfather of five, is turning seventy-five.  On this date, November 14th, the old Royal and I become the same age, and then the following March I pull ahead by adding another year to my age.  We've been doing this dance-across-time since 1948.

I'm retired now and waste a lot of my time blogging.  Charles, who just came into his adult profession less than two years ago, is obviously still working.  His job is largely ceremonial, but even that involves quite a bit of physical exertion, and Charles is also committed to a wide range of charity work which helps to add meaning to his existence.  His current work emphasis is on feeding the poor.

Even though Charles is relatively new to his job, he is nevertheless already the sixth longest-lived British monarch behind his mother, Elizabeth II, Victoria, George III, Edward VIII, and George II.

The new king may have been late in arriving on the throne, thanks to the incredibly long life of his mother, but he had already accomplished the most important of his kingly duties before the crown was placed on his head.  Charles had dutifully spread his seed and fathered the necessary and expected "heir and the spare" to carry his royal lineage safely into the future.

Seventy-five is old, and I suspect that King Charles and I share a variety of aches, pains, and regrets.  He, too, could retire, a move that would certainly lower his stress level and probably lengthen his life, but after waiting so many years for his moment in the sun, I doubt that he would choose that option.  The King appears to be a man who wants to make his mark in the world, but is also acutely aware that he is quickly running out of time.

(Elderly American politicians, on the other hand, do not serve lifetime appointments, no matter what they think, and by the time they are seventy-five they should definitely be out of the way and allowing the next couple of generations to have their turns at running the government.)

Happy birthday, King Charles.  Grab a nap if you get the chance.  You'll be glad you did!

How to Talk Like a Republican

 

by Pa Rock

Citizen Journalist

Former South Carolina Governor and UN Ambassador Nikki Haley grabbed a headline out of the GOP's third presidential debate last week when she tore into fellow presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy and called him "scum" on live national television.  That was not the type of comment that Americans expected to hear from a serious national political figure, and especially from a member of God's own Republican Party.   It was shocking!

Or was it?

Take the case God's close friend, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican politician who wears her crucifix religiously and poses for photos reading her Bible.  Ms. Greene had a falling out with Rep. Lauren Boebert, a one-time friend and fellow Republican member of Congress, over the election of the previous House Speaker - with Greene supporting Kevin McCarthy and Boebert opposed to his speakership.  Last summer Greene referred to Boebert as a "little bitch" on the floor of the House, a rather serious breach of decorum.   But this week things got even more dicey between the two congresswomen when it was reported the national press that Greene has referred to Boebert as a "whore" on multiple occasions to fellow members of Congress.

Or take for instance Rep. Derrick Van Orden who went on a profanity-laden tirade toward some young Senate pages whom he and guests of his encountered taking pictures late one night last summer in the Capitol Rotunda.  The congressman ordered the "little shits" to leave, saying they were defiling the space, and he apparently employed the "f-word" toward the youngsters as well and called them "jackasses."   Van Orden declined to apologize to the Senate pages for his outburst, and he was criticized by both the Democratic and Republican leaders of the Senate for his behavior.  

While the ex-Navy Seal's colorful language offended some of his colleagues, their disapproval did not hold him in check for long.  Last month Congressman Van Orden launched an abusive verbal tirade against some speakers from the Biden administration who were briefing members of Congress on the war  between Israel and Hamas.  Then, when a Democratic member of Congress tried to shame Van Orden into being quiet, the congressman yelled "f--- you!" at his colleague.

And if we move on over to Donald Trump, the examples of obscenity-laden trash talk begin multiplying with the speed of energized rabbits.  Trump, who is so close to God and Jesus that he has been known to take time out of his busy golf schedule to autograph Bibles, nevertheless has also been known to talk like a sailor on shore leave visiting a cathouse.  He attributed his famous filmed remark about grabbing women "by the pussy" to just "locker room talk," or the old "boys will be boys" defense - but Trump's comfort with obscene and vulgar speech is well known and documented, and his voters seem to revel in his vulgarity.

Donald Trump has set the bar for acceptable speech by Republicans, and it is somewhere underground.

Bouncing the Rubble

 

by Pa Rock

Citizen Journalist

The Gaza Strip is one of two Palestinian territories currently controlled by Israel.  It is a relatively small patch of land - 140 square miles - that lies in the southeastern corner of Israel and borders a stretch of the Mediterranean Sea and shares a southern border with Egypt.  The population of the Gaza Strip is just over two million with about half of them being eighteen-years-old or younger, and nearly a third of the population living in the urban center of Gaza City.

Gaza City is where much of the fighting in the current war between Israel and Hamas, the authoritarian political power that controls Gaza, is occurring.  Israel is bringing the war to Hamas after a surprise attack by Hamas on Israel five weeks ago yesterday on October 7th.  The attack, which caught Israel off-guard, resulted in the deaths of more that 1,200 Israelis and the capture of 240 hostages.  The immediate Israeli counterattack into Gaza has killed more than 11,000 Palestinians so far, and the attacks continue.

Yesterday there was a story in the press about a premature baby who was in an incubator at the largest hospital in Gaza when an Israeli airstrike cut out power to the hospital.   The incubator shut down and the baby died.  Today there are reports of the deaths of two more babies at the same hospital, and there are apparently as many as three dozen more there whose lives are in precarious circumstances.  Food for patients and physicians is running out, electricity to the facility operates sporadically, and outside humanitarian agencies like the World Health Organization and Doctors Without Borders are being denied information as to what is occurring in Gaza hospitals, institutions that were once considered sacrosanct when it came to war.

The government of Israel says that it is in pursuit of the Hamas organization which committed the assault on Israel, but they also accuse Hamas of using civilians as human shields to protect their fighters, and consequently nothing appears to be out-of-bounds for this war.  The government of Israel and its allies, including the United States, also spurn the notion of any prolonged cease fire in order to evacuate civilians from the areas of fighting because they feel that a cease fire would work to give the Hamas fighters time to regroup and strengthen.

United States Senator Tom Cotton, a "right-to-life" Republican from the state of Arkansas, added this fuel to the Mideast fire ten days or so after the fighting began.  In a tweet the pious politician said:

"As far as I'm concerned, Israel can bounce the rubble in Gaza.

Anything that happens in Gaza is the responsibility of Hamas."

It's a bloody mess, and reports of atrocities abound.  Today much of Gaza, and especially Gaza City, is rubble, and the rubble is bouncing as more and more bombs and missiles strike over and over again.  Apartment houses, shops, schools, and even hospitals are turning to rubble - and bouncing, and bouncing, and bouncing.

Nothing is safe, no one is safe.   It is a humanitarian nightmare.

I Like Presidents Who Respect Our Veterans

 

by Pa Rock

Citizen Journalist

Retired Marine Corps General John Kelly served as Donald Trump's chief of staff during the first two years of the Trump administration.   He was, arguably, one of the former President's closest and most trusted advisers.  Early last month General Kelly went on record with Jake Tapper from CNN and confirmed several stories regarding Donald Trump's open resentment of our nation's veterans.   

One of Trump's earliest disses of America's military heroes goes back to 2015 when he was first running for the presidency and told a crowd of supporters that Arizona Senator and Vietnam War POW John McCain was "not a war hero."  Trump rambled on that McCain had been regarded as a hero because he had been captured after the Navy jet that he was piloting had been shot down.  He then added in a cavalier manner, "I like people who weren't captured."  General Kelly also confirmed to Tapper and CNN that Trump had repeatedly referred to McCain and former President George H.W. Bush, who had also been shot down while piloting an aircraft during wartime, as "losers."

General Kelly spoke of Trump's disparagement off a "Gold Star" family during the 2016 presidential campaign, an act Kelly saw as a slight to all Gold Star families, and Trump's deep misunderstanding of the concept of personal sacrifice in time of war.   General Kelly confirmed the story of Trump turning to him on Memorial Day in 2017 as they stood in Arlington National Cemetery among the graves of military members who had been killed in Iraq and Afghanistan and saying, "I don't get it.  What was in it for them?"

And obviously Donald Trump did not get it.

Jake Tapper's article with CNN referenced a 2020 article in The Atlantic by editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg which had mentioned Trump's visit to France in 2018 where he was to take part in a commemoration of the century anniversary of World War I by visiting an Allied cemetery.  Trump changed his mind at the last minute and decided not to make the cemetery visit with other world leaders.    While some thought the decision was probably due to Trump's concern about what a light rain that was falling that day would do to his hair, Trump himself chose to redirect the focus to the war dead whose graves the group intended to visit.  He said, "Why should I go to that cemetery?  It's filled with losers."  During that same European trip Trump had referred to the 1,800 US Marines who were killed at Belleau Wood as "suckers" for getting killed.

Trump certainly did not get it.

In 2017 Donald Trump had witnessed a "Bastille Day" parade in Paris, and came home fired up to have a big military parade in Washington, DC, something that he could preside over and that would cast him in the light of a strong leader.  But Trump had conditions for his grand parade.  The French parade had a section for wounded veterans, and Trump told Kelly "Look, I don't want any wounded guys in the parade."  

John Kelly tried to argue with his boss by telling him, "Those are the heroes in our society.   There's only one group of people who are more heroic than they are, and they are buried over in Arlington."

"I don't want them."  Trump said.  "It doesn't look good for me."

And it is, after all, always about Trump.

According to another piece by Goldberg in The Atlantic, this one a profile of Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman General Mark Milley, Trump expressed his dismay to Milley following a welcoming event for the new Chairman in which a severely wounded officer had sung "God Bless America."  Trump asked General Milley, "Why do you bring people like that here?  No one wants to see that, the wounded."

Not everyone chooses to serve in the military, I understand that.  And having served in the military is not a requirement for being President of the United States, I understand that as well.  Our country has had some exemplary political leaders who honed their leadership skills through the military, and we have also had some great leaders with no military experience whatsoever.

It takes a lot of differing points of view and backgrounds to make a country great.

The military - the men and women who did take the time and make the effort to serve our country in uniform  - did so at great personal cost and sacrifice, sometimes the ultimate sacrifice, and they and their sacrifices must not be forgotten, ignored, or disrespected.

I like Presidents who respect our veterans and who fight to provide them with superior health care, counseling, rehabilitation programs, meals, and safe places to sleep at night.  If we give them anything less, we are just freeloading off of their sacrifices.  

Salute!

Manchin Hits the Exit Ramp; Good Riddance!

 

by Pa Rock

Citizen Journalist

"Democratic" US Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia made a long-anticipated announcement yesterday that he would be retiring from the Senate at the end of his current term.  He will not be running for re-election in 2024.  The senator's political stunt set Democratic teeth to gnashing as party leaders openly predicted a loss of control of the upper chamber of Congress because Manchin will likely be replaced by a Republican from the very Red state of West Virginia.  Others, however, minimized the loss by noting that Manchin has a long history of openly supporting the GOP agenda in the Senate anyway, and suggested that it would perhaps benefit the party in the long run to finally be free of Manchin's subterfuge and self-dealing.

(Now people are worried that Joe Manchin will roil national politics by running as an independent for President, or for Vice-President on a Mitt Romney ticket.  If he does, he does, and that is just more proof that Manchin's heart was never in the Democratic Party.)

Maybe, at long last, instead of having to sidetrack important legislation so that the powerbrokers could negotiate with Democrats-in-name-only like Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, the Democrats in the Senate, the real ones, whether they sit in the majority or the minority, will be able to address legislation in a straight-forward manner without having to detour through the pockets and personal priorities of people like Joe and Kyrsten.

Joe Manchin is leaving the Senate and Kyrsten Sinema has less than a snowball's chance of being re-elected to the Senate from Arizona.   May their next careers be more attuned to their personality traits and humanitarian instincts, perhaps as executives in the field of payday lending.

Go away, Joe - and stay away!

Ode on a Gold Commode

 

by Pa Rock

Citizen Journalist

Four British men, each in their thirties, were charged this week in the 2019 theft of a plumbed and operational 18-karat golden toilet from a British palace in an overnight raid that occurred in September of 2019.  The hijacked johnny has not been recovered.

The working toilet, which was created by Italian conceptual artist, Maurizio Catalan,  as a work of art to portray the American dream, was entitled simply "America."   It had been on display in a restroom at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City since 2016 before being moved to Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire, England, in September of 2019 where it was stolen just two days after its installation.  More than 100,000 individuals had used the functional objet d'art during its stay at the Guggenheim to relieve their bladders and bowels in sessions which were limited to three minutes per person.

The golden throne weighed 227 pounds and was valued at around $5.9 million.

At one point before being shipped off to Great Britain, the unique crapper was reportedly offered to the Trump White House for an extended exhibition, but Trump declined.  Perhaps he did not want to park his butt where so many of his fellow New Yorkers had parked theirs.  

Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire, England, is the ancestral home of the Duke of Marlborough and it is also the residence where future British Prime Minister Sir Winston Churchill was born.  The golden toilet had been installed in a bathroom directly across from the room where Churchill was born just two days before it was ripped up and removed by the thieves.   Water damage to the old palace as a result of the toilet's unprofessional removal was said to have been extensive.

Four men have been charged in the theft, others are believed to have been involved,  and the gold commode has not been recovered.  Authorities believe that it has likely been melted down into smaller and more easily transferable units and no longer exists as a useful public accommodation.

"America" may have flushed its final movement.

Another Mother Attack on Liberty

 

by Pa Rock

Open-Minded Reader

A Florida member of the reactionary group, "Moms for Liberty" and who is also running for a seat on her local school board, engaged in a political stunt this week when she and another person showed up at the Santa Rosa Country sheriff's office to make an accusation that a local school librarian had provided "pornography" to a minor.  The pair were demanding a law enforcement investigation because, they said, the governor (Ron DeSantis) had deemed the book to be pornographic, and yet the librarian had offered it up to a 17-year-old minor to read.   The angry mother insisted that a third-degree felony had been committed.

The book that had the school board candidate so excited was a 512-page young adult novel entitled "Storm and Fury," a book featuring an eighteen-year-old protagonist and gargoyles fighting demons.  It has been widely recommended for young people aged fourteen-through-eighteen.  The book reportedly has one "makeout" scene as well as a scene where another leading character "almost" has sex.

Undoubtedly much to the chagrin and consternation of the complaining mother, the county sheriff's office declined to get involved in a school matter and referred the situation back to the school district.

Someday, decades from now, there will surely be some good long-term research released on the impacts that loud and angry activist parents had on their offspring.  It should be very interesting reading even if it does not contain gargoyles, demons, and hints of sex.

But that will be then, and this is now.

And for now:  Don't fear books, but rather fear the people who fear books.  A mind is a terrible thing to starve.

(Storm and Fury by Jennifer L. Armentrout is available from amazon.com and barnesandnoble.com in paperback editions.)

Amtrak Joe

 

by Pa Rock

Citizen Journalist

During Joe Biden's thirty-six long years as a US Senator he traveled from his home in Wilmington, Delaware, to his workplace in Washington, DC, (and back) almost daily on the Amtrak train system.  Of course, "daily" for a US senator is usually three days a week and only during the times that the senate is in session.  Still, Joe estimates that while serving as a senator, he logged over a million Amtrak miles.

Biden made those "daily" trips on Amtrak's busiest section of rail, a system of many terminals, lines, and trains that is commonly referred  as the "Northeast Corridor."  During his campaign for the presidency in 2020, Joe Biden promoted an increase in funding for public infrastructure, and often cited Amtrak as a program which would benefit from his presidency.  

Now, almost three full years into his presidency, some of that promised funding for Amtrak appears to suddenly be shaking loose.  Yesterday at an event at an Amtrak warehouse in Bear, Delaware, twelve miles from Biden's hometown of Wilmington, he announced a commitment of $16 billion for twenty-five major improvements along the Northeast Corridor.

Biden, who appeared to be close to jubilant as he finally was able to announce an upgrade to the nation's passenger rail service, and especially in Delaware.  "It's good to be home," he said.   "There's no better place to be able to make this announcement than in my home state."  He added, "I've been talking about this for a long time, I know.  Finally, finally we're getting it done."

Yes, Joe.  You're getting it done in Delaware, and in the Northeast Corridor - and that's fine because it is a very heavily traveled section of the country's rail service.   But Republicans, as you also said yesterday, do not support public passenger rail service and are, as you put it, "trying to make it slower, harder, and less safe."

If, on the off chance, Republicans retake control of government next year, it would be nice to have some of your infrastructure rail money committed to other parts of the country as well.  Get out and ride some of the other Amtrak routes, Joe, and see the Great Midwest through the big windows of a passenger train, or watch the Columbia River flow toward the Pacific from the windows of a club car.  Take a ride down the West Coast from Seattle to Los Angeles and then take out across the desert toward the Grand Canyon and Flagstaff, Albuquerque, across southern Colorado, and on to Dodge City.  

There is so much more to America than just the Northeast Corridor.  Get out and see it, Joe, from the comfort of an Amtrak train - and take Secretary Pete with you!

Get that rail money committed today - don't wait until it is too late!

And then fire Louis DeJoy!

The Importance of Being Donald Trump

by Pa Rock

Citizen Journalist

This is the day that elderly patriarch of the Trump family will waddle into a Manhattan courtroom and defend his long-established family business practices in a civil fraud trial.  Donald Trump, Senior, will have an opportunity to try to turn around the legal mess that his sons, Don Junior and Eric left the family in after three days of spreading low-grade fertilizer in the same courtroom last week.  Both "boys" tried to blame long-standing fraudulent business practices on the family's accountants rather than accept any of the responsibility themselves.  Eric Trump, in particular, was hammered so hard by the prosecution with emails that contradicted much of his sworn testimony, that one national commentator referred to him as "a bit of a doofus."

One particularly funny national news headline on the internet stated that the "Trump boys" were being tried as "adults."  Don Junior is forty-five and Eric is thirty-nine.   Later this week their sister, Ivanka (age 42), who unlike her brothers Junior and Eric, and her father, is not a defendant in the  case, will nevertheless be called to testify.   Ivanka, the epitome of a working mom (snark intended), is reportedly distraught because she will have to leave her children during a "school week."

Even though the trial is New York is just "civil" in nature, it does seem to have Donald Trump's full attention in ways that the three criminal proceedings against him do not.  The civil trial in Manhattan is a direct shot across the bow of the image of himself that Trump has spent decades creating and refining, that of the all powerful billionaire who rides in limousines and private jumbo jets, the bellicose genius who speaks for the common man without actually having to touch or interact with the common man.  Trump could face fines of up to a quarter of a billion dollars as the result of his fraudulent business practices, he could lose control of some of his vanity properties - such as Trump Tower, and he could even lose the ability to conduct business in the state of New York, the place where he accumulated much of the fortune that he claims to possess.

Today Donald Trump will testify at a trial which could go a long way toward emptying his pockets and deflating his ego - and he is unlikely to go quietly into that dark night of social ignominy.  Nothing is as important to Donald Trump as being Donald Trump.

Today Trump's narcissism will be unleashed and his ego will rush forth in full battle-rattle.  

It should be fun.

Mr. Cooper is about to Lose his Hawk

 

by Pa Rock

Feeder of Birds

The weather has been beautiful the last couple of days here in the Ozarks, a circumstance that has allowed me to get a few things done outdoors.  Yesterday I took down all of the hanging baskets and their dead plants, former flowers which I carefully tended since early spring.  Today I will use several of those now vacant plant hooks to hang bird feeders for the winter.  It will take a couple of weeks for the word to spread, but soon the birds of winter, and especially the beautiful red cardinals, will be back at the feeders and enjoying their annual winter gossip and feeding sessions.

The squirrels may leave them alone this winter because the summer nut production has been astounding.  The acorns are bigger and more plentiful, and hickory nuts absolutely carpet the ground.  I only have one walnut tree, and it usually is not very productive, but this year the crop was amazing.  The squirrels will have a fat winter, and the deer, who like the acorns, should also fare better than usual.

Birds of North America have been in the news more than usual this fall.  The American Ornithological Society has announced that it will officially be changing the names of seventy or eighty bird species beginning next year.   The birds getting the new monikers will be those named after people.  It turns out that not every person whose name was shared with a bird was worthy of the honor.

The process of changing bird names has been on-going over the years whenever a name of a bird became recognized as inappropriate and began being discussed.  In 2020, for instance,  McCown's Longspur, a bird that had been named for Confederate General John P. McCown, was renamed the "thick-billed longspur," which is far more descriptive of the actual bird without promoting racist baggage rooted in the American Civil War.  Scott's Oriole, named after the General Winfield Scott who helped remove the Cherokee from their homelands, will also be renamed.  Bird names tied to individuals involved in historical wrongs will be among some of the first to be changed.

The emphasis now will be on finding names that actually make sense for the birds, that help to describe the various species to researchers and bird enthusiasts alike.  Eventually all birds which bear names related to actual humans will undergo a name change.   Public input in selecting new names will be solicited.

So good-bye Wilson's Warbler, Steller's Jay, and Cooper's Hawk. We'll miss you Lewis's Woodpecker, Bewick's Wren, and Gambel's Quail.   It will probably take us awhile to learn your new names, but be patient and we will reconnect at the feeders!

(I suppose this brings to an end my nascent campaign to have my favorite bird, the "Turkey Vulture," renamed "Pa Rock's Buzzard!"  Oh well, perhaps in a future life I will be one.  Who's up for some delicious roadkill?!)

The Ramble at Sweet Sixteen

 

by Pa Rock

Blogger

That's right.  Unbelievable as it may seem, this daily effort of spleen-venting-through-blogging began sixteen years ago this very evening in a small desert apartment in Goodyear, Arizona.  I was bored and seeking a distraction, and decided that I would teach myself how to blog.   I missed a few days that first year as I debated on whether to meet a daily, self-imposed deadline or not, but gradually my OCD took over and I managed to get something posted every day.  Over the past year I have given strong consideration to retiring the effort, but a couple of "guest bloggers" have stepped forward at critical times and provided relief when it was most needed - and appreciated!

So I continue to bang out something every day - at least for the time being.

The Ramble's readership has declined precipitously this past year due to the fact that I quit Twitter when Leon Elon Musk took over.  I had used that platform to  promote the blog daily and maintained a steady readership of fifty or more per day.  Now, without the free advertising that Twitter provided, twenty readers constitute a good day - and many days the total is nearer to half of that.

But still I type.   I see this effort as a social and political repository of information that might be of use to a few oddball researchers at some point in the distant future: "News and Views of the early 21st Century as Filtered Through Pa Rock."

The history:

This blog has been around through at least parts of four US presidencies, and it has had a lot to say about the way the country has been and is run.  It began on November 4, 2007, during the second term of George W. Bush, with a post promoting the presidential candidacy of Barack Obama entitled "Obama '08," and exactly one year after that posting Barack Obama defeated John McCain for the presidency.  The Ramble contained a posting during every single day of Barack Obama' s two terms in the White House, with many of those dealing with American and international politics and the Obama presidency.   The blog also ran every day of the Trump one-term presidency, and during that time a lot of what I had to say was focused on the immorality and corruption emanating from the White House.  Now we are well into the Biden administration, and still I type.

I lived and worked in the Far East for two of the sixteen years that The Ramble has been in existence, and many of the postings originated in my sixth-floor apartment that overlooked the East China Sea from Okinawa.  I also posted blog entries from a couple of the other Ryuku Islands as well as South Korea, Taiwan, Vietnam, and my personal favorite, Guam.  After returning to the States and ultimately retiring, I had the opportunity to travel to Cuba and did a week's worth of postings from various locations on that island nation.  The blog has also traveled with me to a range of places in the United States including multiple locations in Arizona and Missouri and on to Arkansas, Kansas, Oregon, Washington, Alaska, Hawaii, California, Florida, Tennessee, North Carolina, Texas, Mississippi, Utah, and, of course, beautiful northern Idaho!  The Ramble and I are both well traveled, and some of the high points of those wanderings are archived in its pages.

Over the past two years I have also managed to stuff a lot of my family history into The Ramble.  Most of it will hopefully get separated out into printed family histories, but if I fail to get that accomplished, family researchers can still find my family research buried in the archives of Pa Rock's Ramble.  I have also shamelessly included stories of my children and grandchildren which they may not have wanted to be preserved, but the power o the pen will not be denied!  (Four of my six grandchildren have been born in the years since this blog first appeared.)

And Pa Rock's Ramble has also served as a repository for much of my personal writing.  It harbors some of my really lame poetry, a few short stories, articles from my days of writing for a newspaper, and various free-lance magazine articles that I have written over the years - and even a few college papers.   The Ramble also contains the complete "Rusty Pails" collection - Rusty is kind of fun, check him out if you have some time to spare.  I have also written a few plays, some of which have even been performed - but none of thos are yet preserved in The Ramble, due primarily to formatting issues.  Perhaps someday I will tackle getting them posted as well.

But I ramble!  If this blog had been born human, it would be driving by now!

Thanks for stopping by.