Jeanne’s next door neighbor saw us on the back porch the other day: “Hi. Is that big, fluffy-looking black and white cat yours?”
Me: “He came with me from Texas.” No point giving my cat-ownership philosophy dissertation.
Neighbor grinning: “We watch television late at night with the front door open. He comes by every night and sticks his head inside, looks at us a moment, then leaves. It’s eery when he meets your eye.”
Hydrox is evidently as determined to milk as much living out of this life as I am. Even if it means spying on the neighbors. They’re older than him, but barely.
1959, 1960, I was reading everything Max Shulman wrote because of The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis. In that one he introduced Maynard G. Cribbs of later fame, and gave most people their first look at Beat, Beatniks, and much of the como se llama life outside anything most had considered. Although Dobie Gillis had a TV series in his name, the Maynard Cribbs character lived longer in another vapid TV series about an Island somewhere.
So when I encountered Rally Round the Flag Boysin a box of books at a garage sale recently I happily paid out a quarter for an unexpected delight far in excess of my memories of the book from 50 years ago.
In a 278 page yarn filled with laughs and poignant human insights Shulman peels away the 21st Century fantasies of how America ‘was’, “Thank you veterans, for your service“, and any lingering thoughts you might have about romance, marriage and the American dream when the citizenry saw career military men as “too lazy to steal“.
A wonderful, hilarious book before during and after its own time. Story of a small Yankee town in Connecticut where the US Army needs to place a Nike Missile Site. A brutally honest story of the wealthy people running the town and why they oppose a sanitary landfill because of the cost, oppose sex education in their public schools because of the danger of KNOWING, oppose anything that stands in the way of development of real estate into more neighborhoods for NYC commuters. Neighborhoods located in quarries, bogs, swamps, with names like Powderhorn Hill and Patriot Valley.
What a fun book. I’m finished with it and will happily mail it to you if you’d care to read it. Contact me by email.
Old Jules
Afterthought note: This book teeters on the brink of upcoming events, but barely pre-dates them. No Berlin Wall until 1961, no Cuban Missile Crisis until 19 what?62?, no Vietnam War until 1965, no Kennedys assassinated yet, no Martin Luther King, no Watergate. No Fidel Castro. Cuba was still clean sandy beaches for US tourists. And the book is the “How I view the world” of those US citizens back before things got nasty. J.
If you live in one of the states darkened in blue you might have already seen a Google-driven car as you gnashed your teeth over traffic jams. They’ve logged over 700,000 miles on public roads as of April, 2014.. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_driverless_car
Hi readers. Thanks for coming by for a read.
Probably I was the last person on the planet to find out this is happening. And I should have guessed it, anyway. There’s a particular place in New Mexico where a police car sits around with a dummy in uniform at the wheel to discourage speeding. The inevitable next step was to replace the drivers of cars going past, standing their cars on their noses when they saw the police cruiser.
Admittedly the Google Driverless car doesn’t have the snazzy appearance, the pizzazz of the average cracker boxes and 1948 Dodge-looking cars running around the roads in 2014. But I think if I had a car and a few bucks to spare I’d paint it white, install a fake antenna array on the top, darken the windows, and go around ramming into things just to blow the foam off the top of a long life. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_driverless_car
Things do have a way of making the full circle. Half the drivers today are being directed by the voices of their friendly GPS devices while they text their wives, mistresses, husbands, boyfriends, parents, kids, and people they’re trying to buy something from on Craigslist. A nice Google package would relieve them of the burden of having to be distracted by red lights and road rage. In fact, the model that’s not equipped with steering wheel or pedals would go a step further to allow them to spend every waking minute texting and talking on the cell.
Put a mannequin in the driver seat and give it a cell phone to talk on and this thing will be lobbying for the right to vote and get mechanical insurance. With an inflatable girl-friend sitting in the passenger seat we wouldn’t need Americans anymore.
Despite the fact the US military budget needs a second potential front we can fight wars on to justify being the war material overkill superpower we insist we are, China’s just not going to fill the bill. Yeah, as Yahoo News reports, they’ve got a lot of military spending going on. Whoopteedoo.
Fact is, China doesn’t win wars. Maybe has never won a war in the entirety of Chinese history. Didn’t win against the Japanese in WWII. Didn’t win the Chinese Revolution thoroughly enough to take the Nationalists out of the picture.
Didn’t win the Korean War enough to make it all North Korea. Didn’t even win in 1978-1979 against war-weary Vietnam.
Yeah, Washington and the threat-hungry news services would give a testicle if China could get out there and run someone off a piece of real estate they wanted. But the Chinese have had their asses whipped so many times and in so many places they’re just hoping if they have to fight someone bigger than Tibet they can bluster enough to scare them off.
China ain’t going anywhere. Might as well try to stir up some trouble with Mexico if we’re going to have a credible threat to justify a military budget capable of taking over all the banana republics and oil sheikdoms everywhere when the mood strikes us. Even the Muslims are falling down on the job these days.
Hi readers. The cardiac physical therapy nurses gave me a little counselling today after they caught me cheating on their machines. I haven’t been sticking with the piddling little times and settings they give me on a piece of paper each session.
So I was boosting my walking speeds up as much as I thought I could get by with, staying longer, and when I saw them approaching I’d quickly adjust the settings. Same with the como se llama arm exercizing machine and the walking while sitting down one.
But today I saw them getting cagey, trying to use their animal cunning to outsmart me. Spang caught me trying to spend 15 minutes making circular movements with my arms instead of 10, and at heavier loads and higher speeds.
They’ve got that thing attached to me all the time, shows I-don’t-know-what, and sometimes it twigs them to tell me to pause. If it isn’t ratting me out I figure nobody else has any business being my governor.
Well heck. Those little bitty pissant things they put on the paper for me to do just ain’t where I want to be. Seems to me I ought to have some say in it. But that isn’t going to happen. “You shouldn’t even be walking around!” She scowled at me. Scowled! “You are amazing with what you were doing before you even started coming to these sessions. But you’re going to have to go slow or you’re going to be dead.”
Sitting around waiting rooms exposes a person to a lot of reading material he’d proabably never encounter otherwise. Popular Science magazines are a favorite example for me. They’ve always been great predictors of how our lives will be in the not-too-distant future. As John Prine observed, “We’re all driving rocket ships and talking with our minds” here in this future we’re living in.
Anyway, the November, 2013 edition of Popular Science had a series of articles I found fascinating about some folks who are in the final phases of development of synthetic meats to replace those that came off living animals and poultry. Indistinguishable from the real item. Columbia University’s one of the places it’s happening, not because of better health, but because of the greenhouse gasses resulting from grazing livestock.
Evidently it’s so far along in getting it going they’re already producing real leather that never rode a cow for use on automobile upholstery, etc. And they’re doing well with chicken, since almost everything tastes like chicken.
Naturally, if this doesn’t happen now it well be because the cow industry went in at night and destroyed everything they couldn’t buy up and squash. It won’t be the fault of the lousy record Popular Science has in predicting the future.
Still, it’s nice to think of future generations being able to walk around in the woods without stepping on cow manure if they ever go outside. And driving along rural highways in the west not having to see a yellow sign with a cow on it to warn there’s a rancher feeding his black cows on the pavement at dusk for the insurance.
Interesting stuff, and it ought to get more interesting. Human beings ought to get a lot more violent in a world where there was no real meat that needed killing to take the edge off natural inclinations. And thus far there’s been no mention of where Kosher fits into it all. Synthetic pork might come from the factory Kosher and Jews and Muslims could start sitting down together to a nice ham instead of shooting one another.
Hi readers. Although the Korean War wouldn’t have happened if General Douglas MacArthur hadn’t been so preoccupied about protecting Japan, the Japanese film makers have never said thank you by making a movie about it. Although MacArthur’s, “Korea is a dagger pointed at the heart of Japan” assertion got a lot of US, British, Chinese and other soldiers killed, no Japanese died in it. And no Japanese money, troops, anything, has supported then non-war existing during the half-century since.
Thanks to the Korean film industry and the Chinese film industry a whole new perspective on the Korean War is being handed out to anyone interested enough to watch some movies. I’ll throw one in from the British film industry just to spread the wealth around. A Hill in Koreawas Michael Caine’s first movie role, and as it happens he was a British Army Korean War Vet.
GIs and Korean women:
A Chinese movie about a hard fought battle against US troops during the Korean War:
Two brothers are drafted into the South Korean Army during the war. Excellent film.
Here’s one about British troops fighting in Korea to protect Japan:
But it’s just movies. Fact is, once Japan quit slaughtering troops from all over the planet, other troops from all over the planet began dying to protect the Japanese. And 20-30 thousand US troops are still in Korea prepared to die to protect Japan.
Hi readers. I saw the entire movie, Attack the Gas Station 2, on Netflix and found it fascinating. It ain’t the same Korea I spent 14 months in back in 1963-’64. Hell, it ain’t even a 3rd world country anymore.
When this photo was taken near Camp Howze, Korea [Pong Il Chon], I can say with authority there was a rice paddy somewhere nearby where people toiled from daybreak to dark. Somewhere nearby men were carrying a-frames loaded with firewood several times their own weight. Probably somewhere in Korea there was affluence staying well hidden, but the ‘average’ Korean made a few dollars per month and most would never expect to be able to afford a bicycle anytime during their lives.
But several things impressed me about the Korean film. First, it’s the best photography I’ve seen in any of the foreign films I’ve watched on Netflix lately. Secondly, the characters are wealthy in the middle-class way US citizens, even the poor ones, are wealthy by standards of the 1960s.
Secondly, the kids are easily as stupid as US kids, but it’s a higher quality stupidity. I suppose it hasn’t had time to mature, to become as decadent as US kids manifest constantly in public. Stupidity of Korean kids has the quality of an over-ripe apple that hasn’t yet begun to rot.
And thirdly, the amazing wealth. Look at that gas station, the cars and the people driving them. The motorcycles those kids are riding and the clothes they’re wearing. Observe the body-fat. Those people might well be Americans in the better neighborhoods.
By comparison, consider another Netflix foreign film, this one from Russia. The Suit. Some Russian youngsters fall in love with a Gucci suit in a store window and the adventures they go through to acquire it. And what happens once they have it in their possession.
The Suit is a damned eye-opening good movie, well done and fun to watch, but it doesn’t hold a candle to Attack the Gas Station 2. The Russian kids are smarter, incidently, and not so wealthy.
Hi readers. When you think about it the surprise is the Internet isn’t full of what? Stories? Reports? Incidents? Descriptions of this phenomenon and people for whom the experience is as real as their lives.
But you won’t come across it often. There’s the 300 cases in India a European physician researched and wrote a book about a decade-or-so ago, and a lot of conjectures and suppositions. And the million-or-so people who go around telling anyone who will listen which famous person in history they used to be.
That’s why this case comes across so strongly, I reckons. That, and the fact the kid is from the US, whereas most research into the phenomenon has been elsewhere.
But this one was a US fighter pilot over Japan reincarnated as a kid in the United States. Maybe nothing can be concluded from it beyond something I’ve never doubted anyway, that reincarnation happens. But it’s possible if a person knew which parts of this not to draw any conclusions from a lot might be learned from it.
On the other hand, the human way is to draw all manner of conclusions from every shred of it, construct a doctrine and sand-cathedral from it, and figure out away to make money as a cash cow.
Glad to see the kid didn’t get any wisdom out of the ordeal. Ought to be interesting to watch him along about time when he could volunteer for the US military.
The old guys down at physical therapy are pissed. Evidently five of the Arab freedom fighters the US has been holding captive somewhere are going to be released so’s to get back one GI Arabs captured. Hell of a deal, seems to me, though some might argue a GI is worth ten of anyone else anywhere.
But there are a lot of different ways of looking at the matter. Elected officials are afraid we didn’t get our moneys worth on the deal. I’d have to suspect they think after five years captivity that GI isn’t going to be much use to anyone, which might be their rationale.
On the other hand, people get out of prisons all the time after being gang-raped repeatedly the way that GI almost certainly has been in captivity. And it doesn’t hold them back. Ex convicts are almost all able to stick up convenience stores, steal cars, sell drugs, do a little rape and mayhem. Being gang raped in prison hardly slows them down at all.
So my gut feel is this guy’s probably going to be okay and if he plays his cards right maybe he can sit on top of a building with a rifle somewhere and plink off a dozen-or-so anonymous people of one sort or another. Plenty of ex-GIs are doing that nowadays anyway who haven’t even been gang-raped that we know of.
Anyway, people who are against the trade still ought to feel good knowing an American is worth five Arabs. I can’t help wishing it was ten, though. Would have been ten back during WWII when it was Japanese, I’m guessing.
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 