This one’s still in the US doing duty for a fried chicken joint in Kerrville, TX. But the next lifetime for it might well be Guatemala.
La Camioneta: The Journey of One American School Bus
(La Camioneta) 2012NR1hr 11m You rated this movie: 5 stars – Average of 25,249 ratings: 3.5 stars Follow the journey of a school bus from the United States to Guatemala, where it’s resurrected as a vehicle that transports Guatemalans to work.
The murderers are killing the bus drivers and anyone else who strikes their fancy. Thousands of orphans from homicided parents. And trekking to the US with all the risks is their best chance, even with legions of pedophiles waiting every step along the way. And a welcome from the Statutes of Liberty and a citizenry with a motto, “I got mine!”
I love old school busses. Maybe I’ll get to be born in Guatemala next lifetime. Or better yet, maybe you will, my fellow Americans.
I was watching a movie on Netflix last night about Puerto Ricans living in Chicago, a considerable enclave of them. At one point a 15 year old girl was asking her sister how old she’d been when she first had sex with a man.
“Ohhh. Mom hasn’t talked to you yet? We’ve got to get you a dildo!”
“I don’t want a dildo.”
“No, what you don’t want is a kid before you finish school. A dildo is what you want.”
Earthy, practical. Unexpected.
Streaming on Netflix. Generally a fairly lame movie, other than the thing about the dildo.
Chicago Boricua
(Boricua) 2004R1hr 47m In this edgy character study set in Chicago’s Humboldt Park neighborhood, a group of young Puerto Ricans grapple with issues of identity.
On the other hand, All Night Bodega 2002R90 minutes was okay as such things go:
Seeking a better life for herself, 15-year-old Venus breaks away from her rough neighborhood and gets caught up in a world of violence and crime. More Info
I was going to tell you and forgot. Graduation day at the cardiac physical therapy facility a little fat guy about my age who’s always pretended I don’t exist was standing nearby as I chugged water. He asked one of the other guys who the graduation banner was up for.
“It’s for Jack. He’s graduating today.”
“I wonder if he’ll celebrate by getting a shave and haircut.”
To which I couldn’t resist, “No, but I might try to gain 40 pounds, get six inches shorter and start picking my nose a lot.”
I’m thinking I might have run into the guy in an all-night truck stop when I was hitching through in 1965. 2 am drunken local good old boys noticed me in a back booth swilling coffee waiting for daybreak.
“Hey, what have we got here? Are you one of the Beetles?”
Probably the Synthetic Crisis Manufacturing Center is going to have to find some new plague scare organism after the current Ebola crisis loses steam. The bug has just been around too long waving the bloody flag. I recall as early as 1992 Ebola was being talked about as potentially scary. Same year as hantavirus in northern New Mexico offered itself up to the scare bidness.
Problem is that humanity knows what a bullgoose badass honest to goodness epidemic looks like. 1918 influenza filled the bill and gave a burst of financial health to the cemetery plot bidness. Black plague walked across Europe enough times to burn itself firmly into the memory of everyone since.
Anthrax. HIV. Malaria, Yellow Fever, Cholera. Equine encephalitis. Rabies. Heartworms on dogs. We 21st Century types who own televisions know all about epidemics and epizootic. So naturally not just any yawn in the virus family can keep our attention and adrenalin levels up.
At first glance Ebola looked good. Fairly long incubation period, high kill rate, the victim probably throws off the virus a considerable while before showing symptions sometimes. In ’92 Ebola could stand on its own hind legs as a worthy source of wide-eyed shivering hugging ourselves look-under-the-bed fear.
And you have to admit it’s held up fairly well over the years without actually killing many people or spreading much. This time it’s fewer than 2000 people contracted it, less than half of them dead. Heck, I’m betting there were more people than that chopped to death with machetes last week in Africa. Certainly more killed in Gaza, Syria, plenty of other places as bystanders in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Not to say Ebola won’t someday get loose and kill a respectable portion of humanity. It might. But as a means to fill in for something to be scared of between meteors striking the earth and all the ice on the planet melting it needs to do a bit of outreach. Work a bit harder and explore new locations.
Public relations and a good resume can only carry on so long before something has to be produced. And Ebola’s beginning to appear to be all hat and no cattle.
Hi readers. Monday after Physical Therapy they stood me in front of a Happy Graduation banner, gave me a diploma and card signed by all the nurse-ladies, put a mortarboard hat on me and took a picure. Then they played Graduation March and I went around the room shaking hands while all the old codgers on machines cheered and waved on their various machines.
So the VA paid-for session of my return to physical perfection is done.
I’ve paid for another month use of the Olathe Community Center machines because I’m not 17 years old again yet.
Some of the guys who’ve been using the medical center facility a long time who’d been through similar cardiac situations to mine said they kept improving a while after the first physical therapy, is the reason I’m still hopeful it’s going to improve more despite congestive heart failure. But they also said, every one I discussed it with, that there’s a plateau that comes somewhere afterward, and things don’t get better from then on. It becomes a matter of maintaining, holding what you’ve got.
So I’m hoping the plateau for me will involve an ejection factor a bit higher than the 10-15% the VA and private cardiologists measured before therapy. I need to be able to go out in the world and climb over fences, trespass onto forbidden places. I need to be able to walk down to the grocery store somewhere and back with a bag of groceries inside each arm.
Or at least I need to be able to walk around the streets somewhere pusing a shopping cart with my belongings in it without tiring myself out too terribly. Some things in life a person just hates to give up the prospects for.
But phase one is done. Sorry if you didn’t get your invitation but graduation was never a sure thing. Even during the final weeks, even the next-to-the-last session the fast six minute measured distance walk took the wind out of my sails.
I’m going to miss all those old guys. Especially the ones doing post-graduate work hanging around because they didn’t have a courthouse square to hang around in playing dominoes and spitting tobacco. They’re paying a dear price to go there and can’t even spit.
Most of you will have already seen the news that the VA Medical Centers have been given complete responsibility for preventing spread of the Ebola pandemic to the US. The White House issued the statement Tuesday that, “the facilities are in place all over the nation and are under utilized. Recent new attention to possibly funding the VA Medical Centers and providing physicians who have not had their licenses to practice medicine suspended yet provides a solution to two problems. And a possible solution to a lot of others.”
Workers in VA Medical Centers are numerous and if Ebola or some other contagion doesn’t prevent it, many will enjoy Federal retirement benefits within twenty years. Potential fiscal saving spinoffs for giving Ebola to the VA are enormous.
We humans, we Americans are chock-full of opinions. Most we’ve had for ages, decades, and we can’t actually identify when we came to adopt them, can’t support them with anything deeper than gut feel. Mostly it doesn’t matter because nobody cares anyway.
But the opinions we choose reflect the health of our souls. In a real sense our opinions are who we are. Occasionally it’s worth distancing ourselves from them and the ego attachments we form to them. Just to find out whether our opinions have any connection to anything inside the real world.
An Israeli intelligence service cop cultivates a relationship with a kid living near one of the Israeli settlements and nurtures it. Reason being to create an informant to betray the people who live around him.
The cop might actually kid himself it’s about friendship, that he cares what happens to the kid. He seems to at times. But when discussing it with his bosses in cophood he has to deny it, has to claim it’s about using the kid.
And use him he does. The kid’s brother is a serious player in trying to discourage Israel’s expansion outside its boundaries. He’s killing people in East Jerusalem. The Israeli cops want him badly and eventually the cop uses information provided by the kid to trap the brother inside a building and execute him.
Bethlehem 2013 NR99 minutes An informant for Israel’s Shin Bet intelligence service, Palestinian Sanfur is torn when his brother becomes an agency target. More Info Starring: Tsahi Halevi, Shadi Mar’i Director: Yuval Adler
Unsurprisingly the kid gets pissed, but his involvement with the cop gets him on a hit list among the Arabs for collaborating. He’s offered a possible pardon if he kills the cop.
Your average, “Eek, there’s a nigger in the White House!” patriot never has to ask himself any moral questions, any ethical questions. All he’s got to do is run around in increasingly smaller circles squealing and waving the flag anytime someone points at a war somewhere. “Support the troops!” is about as complicated as it gets. “Stand with Israel,” doesn’t even need saying. Bought and paid for politicians have already taken care of Israel.
But you’ve got to admit those Israeli human beings and those Palestine human beings should be finding themselves with serious questions about what they are doing. Which they probably aren’t.
If you’re a non-Jew living next door to Israel in Palestine you can watch Israel stealing it, piece-by-piece, house-by-house. They’ll come right out and tell you God gave it to them. Some people will inevitably fight back. And those will be labelled terrorists.
If you’re an Israeli and you believe God gave you the keys to the land outside the boundaries set by International Law and the United Nations, anything goes. Duplicity, manipulation, torture, force, bullying, lies. Because you are motivated by the higher good. By the fact that trumps all the others: God gave you anything you want in Israel and Palestine. All you’re doing is taking what’s rightfully yours.
74 years old, a resident of Leavenworth, KS, in an apartment located on the VA campus. Partnered with a black shorthaired cat named Mister Midnight. (1943-2020)
Since April, 2020, this blog is maintained by Jeanne Kasten (See "About" page for further information).
https://sofarfromheaven.com/2020/04/21/au-revoir-old-jules-jack-purcell/
I’m sharing it with you because there’s almost no likelihood you’ll believe it. This lunatic asylum I call my life has so many unexpected twists and turns I won’t even try to guess where it’s going. I’d suggest you try to find some laughs here. You won’t find wisdom. Good luck.
So Far From Heaven 