Hi readers. Some of you evidently come to this blog for the humor, but my brand of humor frequently falls flat for a lot of other readers. So for those of you unable to appreciate my dry, subtle, sometimes off-target attempts at humor I offer perhaps the funniest scene ever to appear on television.
Note the squeeze-box player attempting to keep a straight face while introducing the song. Afterward, the followup by famous wit Lawrence Welk caps the entire performance as he expresses his appreciation for “modern gospel music” performances by young people.
Unlike so many young performers of the time, these already had perfect teeth.
Meanwhile, the songwriters, Brewer and Shipley, were awarded a position on President Nixon’s ‘Enemy List’ and enjoyed honorable mention by Vice President Spiro Agnew before he went down in flames.
Good morning readers. Thanks for coming by for a read.
Those of us stuck with the responsibility for bringing Old Sol up mornings and helping him down evenings try to stay tuned to his moods and political opinions. Especially the DST time changes, of which he just about has a bellyfull.
Here’s what he had to say about this one. You’ll have to listen closely because he recorded it 78 rpm and there’s a lot of static. If you have trouble picking the message out of the background noise, the general summary of his thoughts is that he’s damned sick of it.
WEEKEND SOLAR FLARE: Sunspot AR1429 is still erupting this weekend. On Saturday, March 10th, it produced a powerful M8-class flare that almost crossed the threshold into X-territory. During the flare, New Mexico amateur astronomer Thomas Ashcraft recorded a series of radio bursts at 21 and 28 MHz:
The roaring sounds you just heard are caused by shock waves plowing through the sun’s atmosphere in the aftermath of the explosion. “There is incredible complexity in the waveforms,” notes Ashcraft. “This is a recording of one of the most turbulent events in all of Nature!”
In addition, the explosion propelled yet another CME toward Earth. According to a forecast track prepared by analysts at the Goddard Space Weather Lab, the cloud will hit our planet’s magnetosphere on March 12th at 1803 UT (+/- 7 hr), possibly sparking a new round of geomagnetic storms.
After passing Earth, the CME will also hit the Mars Science Lab (MSL) spacecraft on March 13th followed by Mars itself on March 14th. Mars rover Curiosity onboard MSL might get some interesting readings as the cloud passes by.
Meanwhile, those of you who prefer the emotional side of things have probably been looking forward to the disgusting kissee-kissee going on between Jupiter and Venus.
All I can tell you is it’s an illusion. Jupiter and Venus don’t have enough in common to allow a lasting, meaningful relationship. This is just cheap, physical attraction causing this. Cheerleader Venus shamelessly wrapping herself around the arm of grotesque jockstrap Jupiter for the duration of a shared climax.
No candlelight dinners and moonlight walks for Jupiter and Venus. They’ll each drift their own ways and be off flirting with someone else in just about the amount of time it takes to calculate it.
In the pic they’re patrolling in Placitas, New Mexico. But it’s the same here.
Good morning readers. Thanks for coming by for a read.
There’s a rich-people kind of house up the hill, a quarter-mile south of me. It sits on 90-odd acres of land, has a barn worthy of the name, and it’s been sitting vacant during all the years I’ve been here. Vacant, but for sale.
But a couple of weeks ago a couple of strangers pulled up in front of the cabin on a four-wheeler with side-by-side seats. It’s the first time I’ve ever had an unexpected visitor here except Gale or Gale and Kay. Naturally I scrambled out to find out what they wanted.
Turned out he’d just bought the place and wanted to introduce himself to his nearest neighbor. That done, he left saying they’d be moving in soon. Friendly exchange.
Then yesterday I went up to Gale’s and he was there. They’d just done their moving into their new home. He and Gale were discussing things and I sat down for a quick cup of coffee before going on about my business.
“I’m hoping you won’t shoot my dog.”
“Is it a chicken killer?” Thinking whatever danger there was to his dog probably came in the form of dead chickens.
“It’s never been around chickens. It’s a mutt, a rescued dog, part lab, part herder, part pit-bull. What killing it’s done was cats. I had a lot of feral cats on the last place I lived.” He paused. “I know you have cats down there.”
That gave me pause for thought. While I was thinking, he added, “If you see him, he’s gun shy. Just fire into the air and he’ll run away.”
I’m a man who has a huge respect for how badly neighbor problems can intrude and make life a hell for both neighbors. But I’m also aware that animals can cause neighbor problems lightning-fast. Quicker than almost anything else. For instance, there’s almost nothing that will piss a man off worse than killing his dog, no matter what the dog was doing at the time of demise.
“Tell you what. I’ll make sure my cats don’t come up here killing your dog if you’ll make sure your dog doesn’t come down here killing my cats.” Seemed a fair enough proposition to me. I pretty much figure if my cats go up there attacking his dog, anything on his place, he’s welcome to shoot them, but it would be more fitting if he came down here and put a bullet between my eyes.
He expressed a concern that his dog might mistake me for a cat, saying that since I’m around them I’d have their scent on me, but I assured him that wasn’t a concern. I’ve never met a dog I couldn’t stand off. And I shouldn’t have any reason to be around this one. During my years here I’ve only set foot on that place a couple of times. Once because of cows, and once challenging some people who were up there loading things into a truck. I just politely asked if they had permission, and noted the license number of the vehicle.
The man’s 74 years old, seems a nice guy. Ex-pilot. And if we need to talk we probably will enjoy most things we might discuss.
I surely hope my cats don’t go up there attacking his dog, though, because I’d expect him to shoot them.
Good morning readers. Thanks for coming by for a read this morning.
I trekked up to Gale’s yesterday for a while to talk wind and see whether his face had gotten over the baboon butt similarity it had the previous week. He had a good photo of it during the worst stage I begged him to allow me to post for you, but his refusal didn’t appear to leave it open for discussion.
But he told me about a project I’m feeling uppidy about working on during the year. This place has been overgrazed, probably since the invention of barbed wire, and it shows. I’ve thought from the time I arrived here I’d like to do some cheap but time consuming erosion control, but it never had a priority.
Seems to keep his agricultural tax exemption on the land, though, Gale could go back to having three cows fighting over every blade of grass in the traditional Texas fashion, or he could switch to wildlife management. He had a lady from Texas Parks and Wildlife out here going over the place with him the other day helping devise a plan to submit to the County.
Assuming it gets accepted, I’m figuring something I learned in one of my professions, at least, will finally get put to some worthy use. Between now and my departure from here I’ll have rock and brush dams collecting water and soil into every channel on the place.
I truly love erosion control, but it had slipped my mind how much. I hate to admit the urge to dance naked in the meadow celebrating.
The bottom oven-mitten is your brain if you’re not on drugs. The top oven mitten is your brain if you are on drugs.
A cheap antibiotic normally prescribed to teenagers for acne is to be tested as a treatment to alleviate the symptoms of psychosis in patients with schizophrenia, in a trial that could advance scientific understanding of the causes of mental illness.
Scientists believe that schizophrenia and other mental illnesses including depression and Alzheimer’s disease may result from inflammatory processes in the brain. Minocycline has anti-inflammatory and neuroprotective effects which they believe could account for the positive findings.
The first account of minocycline’s effects appeared in 2007 when a 23-year-old Japanese man was admitted to hospital suffering from persecutory delusions and paranoid ideas. He had no previous psychiatric history but became agitated and suffered auditory hallucinations, anxiety and insomnia.
Blood tests and brain scans showed no abnormality and he was started on the powerful anti-psychotic drug halperidol. The treatment had no effect and he was still suffering from psychotic symptoms a week later when he developed severe pneumonia.
He was prescribed minocycline to treat the pneumonia and within two weeks the infection was cleared and the psychosis resolved. Minocycline was stopped and his psychiatric symptoms worsened. Treatment with the drug was resumed and within three days he was better again. Halperidol was reduced but he remained on minocycline. Two years after his psychotic episode, he was still well.
The article describes at length how and where the tests on patients are going on all over the world.
But Mad Scientists, meanwhile, have another alternative. If you’ve been noticing you are crazy, you can order some of the stuff online from India. A lot cheaper than if a Medico wrote it down on a slip and you trucked to a drugstore for a bottle. And do your own scientific testing.
Or you could just make up some colloidal silver and take an eyedropper-full of it every day. Which is how I keep me and the cats and chickens free of insanity.
Japanese scientists with the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology claimed this week that they have developed a novel new weapon by combining two specialized technologies in such a way that they are now capable of rendering someone unable to speak.
While it’s not technically a weapon, their “portable speech-jamming gun” could certainly be used as one, especially against political leaders or others who speak to large audiences for a living.
Combining a directional microphone and a directional speaker, the “Speechjammer” records and quickly plays back whatever words someone is uttering, making it very difficult for the speaker to focus on what words come next. The effect is called “artificial stuttering.”
I never knew the lady well, but I was briefly acquainted with her when I was writing the piece for Men In Adventure Magazine, Vietcong Seductress, et al. She was a lot more understanding about the slant the editors put on the piece than Sheriff Jim Flournoy. But that was before the Texas news jumped onto the bandwagon.
Edna Milton Chadwell, Last Madam of ‘Chicken Ranch’ Bordello, Dies at 84
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Edna Milton Chadwell, the last madam of the infamous Chicken Ranch brothel, died last week at the age of 84. The Chicken Ranch of La Grange, Texas, was the house of ill repute that inspired the Broadway musical, “The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas.” It later became a hit movie.
After the Chicken Ranch’s demise, Chadwell moved to Arizona where she met her husband and remained for the rest of her life. Her obituary from the Associated Pressquotes her nephew, Robert Kleffman.
“She was a hard-nosed lady. She was very straightforward, didn’t put up with no monkey business, no nonsense,” he said. “Hard-nosed. But with a spine of steel and a heart of gold.” Kleffman added that his aunt didn’t like to talk about her time in La Grange, but she also wasn’t ashamed of it.
Good morning readers. Thanks for coming by for a read.
That adobe was built sometime in the 1930s as a turkey barn, then later converted to a dairy barn until the 1950s. The walls were 18 inches thick, the floor a couple of inches of poured concrete, flat roof that held several thousand gallons of water when snow accumulated on the roof and the canales intended to drain the melt became solid ice.
No heat, rotten iron pipes for plumbing, and a back wall ready to collapse next snowfall. The vigas holding up the roof, cracked timbers sagging with the weight of 75 winters. Roof leaking into the adobe walls, eroding them beneath the vigas enough to cause me to arrange the couch I slept on in such a way there’d be something between me and it if the whole thing collapsed.
The rent was so high I couldn’t afford to pay it, eat, feed the cats and pay the utilities, even with the intermittent jobs I could pick up. So they’d cut off the utilities every few months until I could raise the money to have them turned back on.
Maybe the best place I’ve ever lived. Certainly the hardest.
That last winter living there I was shovelling snow off the roof, slipped and fell into the snow on the ground below and lay there unconscious some undetermined time before I awakened and struggled indoors. Stove up something awful the rest of the winter.
But the cats loved the place and so did I, even as I watched the walls dissolve and the crack between the back room wall and ceiling widen. The near-certainty the house wouldn’t last another winter gradually had me wondering whether I could find a bridge to live under without giving up the felines.
Gale had been suggesting for several years that I move here and live in this cabin on his place. Another winter in Placitas, the cat necessities, and the vice grips of no-obvious-alternatives gradually persuaded me.
Gale and his brother drove up from Texas with a trailer, packed me up and hauled me, the cats, and all my worldly goods down here in one fell swoop. A person can count himself lucky if he can have one friend in a lifetime like Gale’s been to me.
For several years here it’s been easy to not think about what comes next, to just savor being here and the absolute luxury of not being in the joy of Placitas, the adobe, the proximity of some bridge to live underneath. We seemed a lot younger, that short time ago, Gale and me. The cats, too, for that matter.
But aging comes more quickly these days and it’s creeped into the picture until it fills it. The Coincidence Coordinators are nagging at me with increasing urgency and insistence to look for the next bridge not to live under.
So far I believe I’ve been the luckiest man ever to walk the face of this planet, possibly among the happiest. I’ve discovered I’m nowhere near as tough as I once thought myself to be and Placitas taught me I’m also not the pioneer my ancestors were. I wouldn’t change a minute of those years after I gave myself a Y2K, but I sincerely won’t regret not doing it again if I don’t have to.
But maybe now I’ve toughened up enough to make the next step as much a blessing as this one’s been.
I probably should post this on Ask Old Jules, but nobody much reads that blog. Not that it matters whether anyone reads it, I suppose. But if I’m going to compose words something in me likes it better thinking it will be read by someone else, than to just fade into oblivion.
I’ve been thinking a lot about this solitude addiction of mine lately, attempting to be candid with myself about it and what it means. The tripwire involved several emails I’ve received asking what makes me do it, want it, whatever. It’s plain enough the emails were sincere and genuinely interested, at least on some level. But it’s also patently obvious the concept is foreign enough to those asking to leave them without a foundation for thinking about it.
One of the emailers was a cautious man carefully lo0king for someone to keep an eye on a property he owns in a remote area. He’s somewhat caught between conflicting realities, I suppose. There’s a need for someone ‘responsible, someone he can trust. But anyone who’d stay there and do what needs doing is going to be a person he can’t understand, can’t identify with.
His concern’s legitimate. If he allows someone to occupy the place and they happen to be the sort to cook meth on the side, or grow illegal herb, he’s in danger of having the property confiscated. But he also runs that risk even if the grower or cook enter the unattended property without his knowing it. Absentee ownership isn’t as seductive a proposition as it once was.
But the email exchange did get me asking myself to form some candid understanding of exactly what motivates me and why I’m a lot happier not being around people much. And the eventual answer startled me a bit, seemed internally inconsistent.
I generally like people okay as individuals, I concluded, but dislike them in the composite. I don’t have much in common with groups, but I can almost always find something in common with individuals. So when I meet strangers in town I find I’m able to have friendly, enjoyable exchanges, though brief.
But I’m always acutely aware that each of those strangers is a part of some larger we, identifying with it, considering himself and it inseparable at some fundamental level. And almost every ‘we’ I’ve ever examined closely has led me to want nothing to do with it.
However, another piece of being around ‘we’ identifications scattered around all over urban landscapes is the forced realization of isolation and exclusion of a different sort than that of a hermit, deliberately self-imposing solitude.
The simple fact is, I get lonely and hell when I’m around people. And I’m not lonely at all when I’m not.
At least I think I might if I tried it. I actually don’t recall ever feeling lonely under those circumstances, though I do recall not caring for it.
It must have been an Eve, Christmas or New Year, 1996 or 1997. Keith and I, or Mel and I were partnered that trip and the cold, or the mud drove us into town. We got a room in the motel you see just beyond the cafe with the chuckwagon on the roof. Quemado was dead, every business in town shut down except the bar underneath the yellow sign on the right side of the picture.
Sometime after dark we wandered across the highway to the bar. A couple of pickups were parked in front and we hoped there’d be a hamburger and beer to be had. At least we figured it would be warmer than the motel room.
We stepped up to the bar and examined the half-dozen other customers through the smoke as we pulled off our coats. Behind the bar a guy probably named Bad Teeth was grinning, looking us over. Same as everyone else in there, all of whom appeared to be ten-generations of first cousins inter-married to Bad Teeth’s ancestors.
“Any chance of getting something to eat?” The faint odor of hamburgers lingered in the background.
Bad Teeth just grinned and looked past me at the badasses huddled over one of the tables. “You won’t be here that long.”
“Long enough for a beer, anyway.” My partner was showing signs of irritation.
“Only certain kinds of people come in here.” My eyes followed where Bad Teeth was pointing at the cluster of bullet holes in the ceiling. “Nobody else stays long.”
But my partner, Mister Wiseass, wasn’t looking at the ceiling. He was letting his gaze size up all the drinkers, them doing the same to us. “Gay bar in Quemado?” He poked me in the ribs with his elbow, laughing. “He’s right. If anyplace else was open we ought to go there.”
The door was only a few steps away. I grabbed his arm and headed for it. “Let’s go there anyway. The smoke’s stuffing up my sinuses.” I suppose we’d have just been too much trouble. Nobody followed us out to the street.
Or maybe it really was a gay bar. I’m happy enough not knowing.
Bad judgement was driving to Quemado instead of another 80 miles to Springerville, AZ, if we wanted something as complicated as a hamburger. Just saying.
When Ned Sublette used to sing the song linked below at a honkytonk out on the West Mesa in Albuquerque he always got out alive. Maybe all those cowboys were just glad someone finally said it.
Old Jules
Ned Sublette: Cowboys are Frequently, Secretly Fond of Each Other:
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 
