This still seems about as salubrious a means of replacing a prez as the one we’ve been using. Time we bellied up to the bar and admitted we love being governed by dynasties of aristocrats. And that aristocrats in this country are anyone who’s a celebrity and rich. Michael Douglas for prez, for instance, because he’s got such a wide range of experience in the movies qualifies him. Provided he has a sexy wife to succeed him when some returned US Navy SEAL offs him with a sniper rifle. Recall, Lee Harvey Oswald and Charlie Whitman were both ex-Marines.
Hi readers. Thanks for coming by for a read. Not all of this is humor.
Must have been November, 1962, election day in Massachusetts though we didn’t know it. Three young GIs in uniform, Tony Bozza, Julio Ditata and I were off work. We lived in a brownstone house converted to apartments on Beacon Street, so we wandered over to an ice-cream joint on Boylston Street across from Boston Plaza.
As we finished off our ice cream we saw police cordoning off Boylston Street, people drifting in behind them. Something was happening so we rushed out for a front-line position. Asked one of the cops what was going on.
King/President Kennedy was in town. Came to vote for his brother for the Senate. Maybe State Senate. I can’t recall for certain. JFK was going to stay at the Plaza Hotel across the street. “Salute when he drives by
Experts agree that almost everyone born in the US between 1950 and 1960 was conceived in the back seat of a Ford, General Motors, or Chrysler automobile. The overwhelming majority of the comparative few exceptions were mainly Studebakers because of the convenience of the suicide-style back doors opening forward to allow more horizontal legroom. The highest percentages go to the 1949 Ford Club Coupe, the 1954 Chevrolet Sedan, and the 1956 Ford Crown Victoria.
But I’ve digressed. My point is, almost nobody was conceived in a pickup or passenger car with a floor shift or bucket seats. And nobody, not one pregnancy resulted from sexual congress in a hotrod. Which is the reason parents allowed youngsters of the day to build and drive them. A young man with a hotrod had little time or need to devote himself to the pursuit of female company.
Naturally the music industry approved this means of birth control and tried to the best of its ability to stimulate interest in and sing the virtues of coffins on wheels, speed, running from the law and other non-sexual avenues of endeavor for young men.
Red Foley’s, ‘Hotrod Race‘ was the first of these:
After a tasteful passage of time this was answered by Charlie Ryan’s, ‘Hotrod Lincoln‘, claiming to be the person driving the Model A who passed Foley and the car he’d been racing against in ‘Hotrod Race’.
George Hamilton IV, in “If You Don’t Know” attempted to combine an interest in girls and hot cars by driving a ’54 souped up Ford Deluxe with high compression heads and overdrive, which succeeded for speed but had mixed results with females.
The Beach Boys were a bit late off the starting line with “Little Deuce Coupe” in 1964 because the sexual revolution had come along allowing babies to be conceived elsewhere than the back seats of automobiles. However, I mention it here to demonstrate the lingering nature of fads, once begun. Long after hotrods were no longer needed to protect the virtue of young men in the US, the sound of a burned out muffler still caused a faster heartbeat.
Robert Mitchum followed the formula in Ballad of Thunder Road, combining fast cars and running from the cops with filling up the spare space in the automobile with mountain whiskey instead of females. The song led to many a high-speed chase around the cities of America providing thrills to both police, and teenagers. And frequently ambulance and hearse drivers.
When the Nash Rambler hit the market nobody mistook it for a cool aphrodisiac setting for launching future generations. The car was considered ugly, though it appealed so a certain type. But since it wasn’t for the one thing, it must be for the other. At least in the minds of the music industry:
Although I doubt many children begin their long journey toward birth in modern automobiles now, there are a lot of similarities to the hotrod part of the 1950s love affair. People love being seen in Hum Vees and dooley trucks. Everyone wants a SUV. And a person still sees the occasional racy sports car.
Mostly today the guys don’t roll up their pants cuffs, though, and some do find themselves attracted to women.
Later this year when the petrodollar crashes and burns most of you will probably be hoping the Mexicans will revise their immigration laws. Likely you’ll recall the last time the US economy fell on really hard times how US workers drifted to Mexico and further south looking for work. It wasn’t a lot better there, but there was less English speaking competition for jobs.
Here’s an example from the Bogart movie, Treasure of Sierra Madre:
Things haven’t really changed much, have they. Except the guy doing the hiring and cheating them out of their pay is a gringo in Mexico instead of a gringo in the US.
I’m betting those Mexicans will be tickled pea-green to have gringos coming down to work.
I’ve told you plenty of times the lengths I go to finding miniscule sodium or no sodium food products to prepare for myself. I’ve found a good many more since the last time I talked about it.
For instance, cranberries were on sale for a buck per bag during the holidays and knowing how heavily I use cranberries I loaded up Jeanne’s freezer. Every day I put a handful into my breakfast oatmeal. Adds zest. But even that gradually becomes ho hum.
Naturally there’s a lot of ginger nodules around here because both Jeanne, and I cook with ginger. She’s careful and skins hers before grating it. I just chunk mine into the blender, fill that blender up with shredded ginger, then flatten it so’s it’s easy to break off inside the baggie when frozen. [Gallon freezer bags work best] So spang, pull it out of the freezer, break off a piece, and you can put a hefty ginger flavor to anything you please.
This morning I’m having ginger-cranberry oatmeal. It hits the taste-buds a bit hard the first spoonful, but after that oatmeal becomes a someone you’d like to get to know better.
I’ve come up with a number of other items I’m planning to tell you about, even though there’s probably not anyone else here who’s fanatic about keeping salt ingestion below 2000 grams per day. There’s stove top pizza, stovetop wheat buns, green chili Swiss cheese omelets [amazingly low sodium] huevos ranchero style.
And so on. I’m going to try to remember to post some ingredients and methodology as the year rolls out and I find more of them or run new trials on the ones I’ve already invented.
I’ve got to find a replacement for Hatch green chili, by the way. They had it in the grocery stores [outside them] here during harvest time, and I bought a few pounds to run through the blender and freeze. But I’m running dry on them.
These were only partly roasted, but Jeanne’s son, Michael, roasted them in an outdoor barbeque for me. I debated on peeling them and decided it’s time the world found a way to get loose from green chili skins without anything labor-intensive. So I blended the bejesus out of them and turned out to be right. They’re great.
I’ve been thinking a lot about us veterans lately, possibly because of the recent VA fiasco including my own healthy part of it. Which put me into close proximity with a lot of other old model vets.
I’m going to start this off with what General Smedley Butler had to say to the Veterans of Foreign Wars in possibly the most honest address in history by a general-grade officer:
Old Confederates trying to recall the rebel yell:
Spanish American and Civil War veterans trying to remember how much fun it was.
Then there’s WWI:
I couldn’t find any veterans of the American Indian Wars being interviewed, though there were plenty of them still alive long after the movie camera and recording was invented. I suppose John Wayne will have to do. We veterans all owe him a tremendous debt of gratitude anyway.
Hell, it’s already January. Damned year is almost over and I’ve got a lot to do. Jeanne had a box here with what’s left of my old hundreds of cassette tapes I converted during the 1980s from vinyl LPs. I’ve tried to get as much as possible from the local library and InterLibrary loan, but some of it just isn’t out there.
I say it isn’t, but probably a lot is on YouTube and available from Amazon if a person pays for it. But I donealready paid for this back in the day when music was music and everyone was glad of it.
Time was I believed my favorite bluegrass album was Jonathan Edwards and Seldom Scene, Blue Ridge.
However, I eventually found this one elsewhere digitized. The library was also helpful finding old Louvin Brothers I didn’t expect to be available anywhere.
On the other hand, I once believed The Red Clay Ramblers were the best bluegrass ever and had a lot on cassette. And today nobody’s ever heard of them for the most part. The Johnson County Library doesn’t have any of their work.
So most of what I have by RCR on tape will be all I ever listen to in the future once I convert it to MP3. Then there’s Ned Sublette’s early years, a guy I used to know named Jerry Sires, along with [not enough] other tapes Jeanne salvaged from my ruins after Y2K.
A new project for 2015 and the damned year’s almost gone already. These things take time.
There’s something new on the Universal Love front to begin pondering: Hydrox and Shiva-the-cow-cat appear to be slouching into some sort of hanky panky. They’ve been observed lying side-by-side on Jeanne’s bed.
These cats have known one another for more than a decade and never a kind word has passed between them. Hydrox surprised me last year when he began licking the face and inside the ears of Tabby whenever she got aggressive, but Tabby was an entirely different matter. What Shiva’s always wanted was to be left strictly alone by other cats.
Until now. She’s the one jumping on the bed as the party of the second part, not the first.
Also, sometime around 2 am Christmas Eve I heard cat racing noises, sat up in bed and saw Hydrox run from Jeanne’s bedroom into the kitchen. With Shiva in hot pursuit. I shook my head and wiped my eyes in time to see Shiva race out of the kitchen closely pursued by Hydrox, back past Jeanne’s Christmas tree into her bedroom.
I’m convinced they’re teetering on the brink of a Christian Era.
And meanwhile Wavy Gravy Duff, managing editor over at Veterans Today did a wordy Christmas post bragging of his past life without being too obviously obnoxious nor untruthful. For that matter, aside from Jonas Alexis there were no Jew baiting/hating articles during the Christmas truce.
Soooooooo if we’re not teetering on the brink of a Christian era I think we’d better all start digging bomb shelters.
Hi readers. Thanks for coming by for a read this morning.
Bob Hope used to do those USO shows every year. In fact Al Jolson died in the aftermath of returning from a USO show in Korea. Fact is, any Christmas entertainment that includes John Wayne jokes and nasty jibes at draft dodgers burning their draft cards is probably worth a rerun anytime anyone is singing songs about Peace on Earth, Goodwill to Men.
Ms. Welch, at least, is about reality, which every USO show should include a taste of.
As an aside, a lot of you probably didn’t know Clint Eastwood’s real identity was Andy Williams. Here he is singing something I thought of as a favorite in 1963.
No Christmas is complete without Clint Eastwood singing Old Bilbao Moon.
Hi readers. Thanks for coming by for a read. A few days ago Jeanne decided to give me a shot of rare pleasure. She took me to my favorite place in the Kansas City area: A giant Asian grocery store.
As we entered the large vestibule at the entrance I noticed large ceramic pots for sale and the one below caught my eye.
I walked over for a closer look and called to Jeanne. “Look at this!” Pointing with my cane, “These are petroglyphs from the US!”
Meanwhile an Oriental man noticed me from inside and rushed out. “One hunnerd dollars! One hunnerd dollars!” I dragged my attention away from the pot and stared at him. He pointed to another pot. “Fifty dollars! Fifty dollars!”
Then he pointed inside the pot and shouted, “Look!”
So the burning question is, are Asian petroglyphs so similar to Native American petroglyphs as to be indistinguishable from them? These pots seem to be decorated with some symbols definitely not Native American, mixed promiscuously with reproductions of petroglyphs I’ve seen countless times in New Mexico and Arizona, Colorado and Utah.
It’s clear no matter what the answer might be that Asians have gotten the jump, however, on the ceramic petroglyph trade.
If I had someplace to put one of those pots and something I wanted to put in it and $100 lying around with nothing to do I think I’d just buy one of those pots. And maybe haul it over to Zuni or Acoma to give them a looksee. The tribes have been losing business to Asians copying their fetishes, their kachinas, their other crafts for a longish while. Maybe a bit of reversed engineering of petroglyph covered pots would provide a shot in the arm for them.
Aside from the fact nobody’s likely to buy some damned pot covered with petroglyphs.
Some few, some happy few, some band of brothers of you mightn’t have thought about this song in a while. Which seems a shame.
But that’s not what I wanted to write about this morning. I actually wanted to tell you about the time I spent half a day poking around the town lots along the highway in Canyon City, Colorado looking for evidence of a long-burned out diner. Ian Tyson recorded the song in the 1960s and when I found myself in southwestern Colorado I couldn’t resist.
But I didn’t find the ruins of that diner and Jeanne, midway through writing this, advised me I wrote about searching for those ruins on here sometime before.
So there I was, riding a plastic saddle of a blog entry as a consequence of having a mind that functions too much it its own image when it comes to thinking up anecdotes to reflect on.
Hells bells. I could tell you about the young man who lives next door to Jeanne and his difficulties finding a job, but nevermind that. He’s a fine young man with a lot of experience as an automotive mechanic, but he has some brain disorder causing him to need an extremely expensive medication so he can think in straight lines. When he doesn’t get it his thoughts go everywhere.
$300-$400 per month the damned stuff costs and he doesn’t have medical insurance. So he quit taking it January and by March Mazda was deciding they didn’t need him anymore going to get the same wrench fifteen times and forgetting what he was after.
So from then until now he’s been looking for another job without measurable success, though he does a little security work filling in, and the night it snowed he drove a bobcat around clearing a parking lot.
But for any job of a regular nature nobody’s calling him back. Even though he worked eleven years for Mazda never a hitch.
So, when he’s not filling in applications for jobs he turns on this giant TV screen and loads up a game the likes of which I’ve never seen nor imagined. I is an authentic appearing urban environment with a lot of authentic appearing men in combat gear stalking one another around shooting one another and otherwise dealing misery. I’m guessing it’s a lot more seductive than working down at AutoZone selling auto parts.
Brent’s the man’s name and he’s taken to visiting me some, killing time. He told me about two documentary movies about Afghanistan he’s seen recently:
Restrepo 2010 R 93 minutes. Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington embed themselves with the Second Platoon in Afghanistan, chronicling the men’s work, fear and brotherhood
Korengal 2014 R 84 minutes. This follow-up to the Oscar-nominated documentary “Restrepo” delves into the experience of war and how it impacts those on the front lines.
I don’t have much interest in the US military adventures anywhere but he sparked my interest and I watched them. Glad I did because it revealed something I hadn’t thought seriously about.
Those honest-to-goodness US soldiers stationed in the hottest combat zone in Afghanistan being followed constantly with cameras and recorders throughout their tour loved war! During firefights they whooped and cheered when they thought they killed someone. And between firefights they pined for someone to shoot at.
When they’d almost served out their tour the cameraman asked them, “What are you going to miss most about Afghanistan?”
A surprising number answered, “Shooting people.”
Under questioning it was clear none of those troops thought they were doing anything patriotic. They’d been filtered from the US population to find people who’d hooha their way out into the killing fields and love every minute of it.
So when the young guy neighbor said he regretted he couldn’t join because of his daughters and his medical condition it went a long way to explain that game he loves playing on his television. A plastic saddle.
One of the GIs gave an interesting reply though, on one of those documentaries.
“I’m going to have to go home and live with what I’ve done. I think God hates me. God didn’t intend people to do what we do here.
“I hate it when people say ‘you did what you had to do. I didn’t have to do anything. I didn’t have to kill anyone. I didn’t have to join the Army. I chose all that and now I have to live with it.”
With vets offing themselves at a rate of one per hour the guy might be a worthy object for study by the people who worry about such matters. It ain’t a plastic saddle he’s riding back to the Home of the Brave.
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 