DUMB! DUMB! DUMB!

Blog number   192                                                              26 June 2008

Dear Diary, it's been a while.  Did you miss me?  And could you excuse me a minute while I talk to my blog?  Thank you.  You're a sweetie.

Jon Stewart on the Daily Show was talking about Beijing, the site of the next Olympics, being one of the most, if not the most, polluted city on the planet.  A clip was shown of the really dirty skies there.  And they were really dirty! 

Jon talked about the poor athletes having to breath that stuff, and a famous marathon runner was not going to show up for practice, that he was waiting for the day of the trials so he wouldn't have to breathe that poison any more than he had to.

I got a vision of those athletes running in poison like a bunch of insects having an Olympics in a jar that had been sprayed with insecticide.  I think if I had been invited to participate in the Olympics as an athlete, I would refuse.  No, I don't think so.  I KNOW so.  I wouldn't accept bleeding lungs for a gold medal, no way. Never.  Why in Heaven's name would any clear thinking person do that anyhow?

It reminds me of when this bunch of supposedly wise people here in America who have been chosen to decide things for me, decided to send a satellite off into the outer regions of space with clear directions for any aliens that found it, on how to find us.  Sheeze!  Isn't that about the dumbest thing you could think of?

Wouldn't you imagine that one of the "deciders" would remember how humans treat newfound species?  If we can't use them or eat them, we kill them if they interfere in any way with our comfort.  How could anyone imagine that a species advanced enough to find their way here would treat us any differently?  Wishful thinking? Naivety?

It's like that story of teaching a Mynah bird to say, "Here Kitty, Kitty," and then letting it loose in central Park.

Dumb!  Dumb! Dumb!

MORE MOTHERS

Blog number   192                                                              19 June 2008

I was watching an animal thing on the telly and I again saw an amazing thing.  Thing thing thing.  My vocabulary is amazing.  There.  I did it again.  In order to appreciate what follows, you gotta know that lions and hyenas are mortal enemies.  I have seen film of them killing each other - actually hunting down and killing each other.  They fight whenever they get close. 

Anyhow, this lion jumped up into a tree and grabbed a carcass that a leopard had placed there.  As the lion and the carcass hit the ground, a hyena rushed in and tried to grab it away from the lion.  They hassled a bit and then both settled down and ate from the same carcass.  It was a sight watching those two eat right next to each other, peacefully.

Turned out that the lion was pregnant and probably didn't want to risk a real fight.  The hyena eventually grabbed the remains and ran off with it.  Those creatures are pugnacious!  The lion outweighed it three times and had claws besides.

Which reminds me...I was reading a book by a guy that hunted down human killers and he was called in to a native tribe where the chief's mother had been killed by a lion.  The hunter carefully asked the chief if he would leave his mother's body where it fell in hopes the lion would come back.  The hunter carefully explained that if they didn't, the lion would kill someone else. The chief agreed to leave his mother's body where it lay.

The hunter killed the lion and went to thank the chief for his sacrifice and through an interpreter, he discovered the chief asking if he would leave the body there for a while and get rid of some of the hyenas that had been hanging around.

MOTHER EXTRAORDINAIRE

Blog number   191                                                              16 June 2008

I just read in the book, "Human Smoke," about a mother holding her child on the edge of a pit where the Germans were having the executed Jews stand before shooting them.

She said that just before she heard the second command, she threw her child into the pit and then jumped in on top of her.  She heard the shooting and felt the bodies falling on top of her and then a second shooting with more bodies, and then she heard arguing and then all was quiet.  She crept out with her child and both survived the war.

I appreciate a human that can do something like that.  Talk about cool under fire.

NO SHYTE, SHERLOCK.

Blog number   190                                                              16 June 2008

I was walking by the telly on my way to my computer and Teresa had one of those reality legal shows on and I saw the sentence, "A confession can hurt a defendant's case."

SID CAESAR

Blog number   189                                                              16 June 2008

Back in the '50's, Sid Caesar was way funny, but since he has gotton old, he has lost his way and is no longer funny.  Too bad, but show business is a tough master as I discovered in my youth when I was as funny as Sid used to be but am now as funny as Sid now is.  Not my fault, either.

Not my fault.

Nope, not my fault.

BETTER THAN I COULD DO, EVEN ON A GOOD DAY

Blog number   188                                                              14 June 2008

Saw a movie yesterday.  I saw it once before several years ago, so this time I was able to notice things outside the movie.  The movie is called, "City of God" and I am pretty sure it is a Brazilian movie, subtitled.  It is about these orphans running the streets in Rio, dealing dope, killing, robbing, general mayhem.  Real animals.  Fascinating movie. 

What I noticed the first time I saw it was that it was hard not to get caught up in the action.  Something was always either happening or leading up to a happening.  The first time I watched it, I kept thinking of it as a documentary. 

The acting in unbelievable - especially since the actors are very young, and none of them really old, or even middle aged - except the victims.

One kid - and he was the norm as far as acting goes - seven to ten years old, he got shot in the foot and I tell you, I'm kinda of the idea that the kid actually got shot in the foot.  He couldn't be THAT good an actor, could he?  But would an international movie actually shoot one of the actors for realism?  It reminded me of the acting of Tom Hanks in Castaway where he had to knock out a bad tooth with a rock.  THAT was some good acting - and THIS was as good as that.  Honest.

THIS AND THAT

Blog number   187                                                              13 June 2008

The Mommy bird is back nesting.  Second crop, I guess.  I looked out there the day after the last chick left and scared a bird out of the nest.  At the time I thought it was the young'un coming back home for a spell, but now I think it might have been the Mommy, starting a new family as soon as the old one left the nest.

We went to the credit union to pick up my fifty-cent pieces this morning and a man came in with a small person - evidently the small person's driver.  On the "driver's" black tee-shirt were the words in white print, "I've had it up to here with midgets" and below those words was a white line

IT'S A MAN THING. YOU WOULDN'T UNDERSTAND

Blog number   185                                                              06 June 2008

Bacardi Mojito commercial - pure genius! Dum dum de dum dum.  Dum.  Dum. 

RETREAT HELL, WE JUST GOT HERE.

Blog number   186                                                              12 June 2008

In the beginning of WW 2, Norway was quickly overrun by the Germans, as was Poland, France, Belgium, Holland, et al.  Briton had a squadron of aircraft parked on a frozen lake in Norway, thirty - forty aircraft?  Anyhow, the Germans simply bombed the frozen lake and sank the whole squadron.

Briton didn't do too well in that war by itself, evidently.  Took a lot of punishment - more than it dealt out - due to infighting, carelessness, bad leadership, also et al.

Harold Nickolson, in his dairy wrote, "It is perhaps fortunate that the British Expeditionary Force is so good at retreating, since that is mostly what they do.

It is not just in the European theater that the British were so ill thought of.  Gen. Stillwell in Burma also had the same trouble with them.  Bad leadership, quick to retreat.

                                               *******************
Clare Boothe, American Journalist was driven around the Maginot Line - a series of French fortresses and pill boxes designed to keep the Germans on their own side of the fence.  It was a magnificent fortification and the French were quite proud of it. 

Since it was obviously impregnable, Boothe asked if the Germans couldn't simply come some other way. 

The commandant and his subordinates laughed.  "What other way?

"Holland?  Belgium?"

They laughed some more.  "The Germans are stupid, but not that stupid."

Of course, that's the way the Germans came.
                                         **********************

THIS MIGHT SHOCK YOU!

Blog number 185 *** 06 June 2008

In a paper, magazine, somewhere, I read that several famous people were asked what book they were reading. Billy Bob Thorton said he was reading, Electric Universe and that it was fascinating. I thought, "Well, I'll order it from the library and give it a shot. Billy Bob was right. It IS fascinating.

It's not about electricity per se. It's about the people involved with electricity - like Watt, Hertz, Morse. It's about their experiments and experiences with electricity. Did you know, for instance, that Morse didn't invent the telegraph? No, he didn't. Lots of people did. He was the one that patented it. What he really wanted to do was to get rid of the Catholics. Yeah, I know. Weird, huh?

He was reviled for his activities and for his behavior. For instance, his lawyer was very embarrassed to have to inform the Supreme Court that Morse's "daily notes" concerning his experiments with the telegraph were burned in a mysterious unwitnessed fire just the night before.

At the beginning of Chapter six, there is an excerpt from the dairy of Heinrich Hertz. It tickled me, so maybe it'll tickle you.

And I quote;
27 Jan 1884. Thought about electromagnetic rays.

11 May. Hard at Maxwellian electomagnetics in the evening.

13 May. Nothing but electomagnetics.

16 May. Worked on electomagnetics all day.

8 July. Electromagnetics, still without success.

17 July. Depressed; could not get on with anything.

24 July. Did not feel like working.

7 August. Saw from Rice's "Friction Electricity" that most of what I have found so far is already known.

(ed. note) Six plus months shot to hell.

YOU BIG BABIES!

Blog number   184                                                              06 June 2008

The only babies I got to talk to today were a pair of identical twin girls in Starbucks age "fifteen and a half."  They were so cute!  One of their boyfriends was with them and I asked how he came to pick the one twin and not the other, and the other said, "'cause I don't like him." 

I asked why she didn't like him and she said, "'cause he's a jerk."  It could have been joking, maybe jealousy, Teresa thinks she has to be that way so the sister doesn't get jealous of her.  The boy didn't seem to be bothered by what the sister was saying.

I heard the boyfriend tell his girlfriend that he came up to talk to her at first because someone dared him to.

One of them started to tell us about a show they saw in Las Vegas and she prefaced the telling - to make sure we understood, "Have you ever heard of the Beatles?"

I think young people think that old people were always as they see them now.  My grandparents always seemed the same age to me for twenty-five years.

The girls had a habit of talking and then seeming to space out - just like babies do!  Although they were identical twins, both Teresa and I never even suspected they were sisters because they looked so different.  Upon closer inspection, their faces looked identical to me, but their hairdos were so different that they didn't even look like sisters, let alone identical twins.

Both of them had been grounded by their mother because of the hairdos.  Teresa asked them, if they were grounded, what are they doing in Starbucks. One said because their parents forgot to buy food, so this is their "cafe."

We took them to their home, which was a beautiful rambling house surrounded by a high fence with a large electronic iron gate which opened when the proper code was put in. The whole grounds looked like a movie set.  Absolutely beautiful. 

Both of their grandparents live in Casa Grande too, so I imagine the family must have been cotton farmers, copper miners, or something else indigenous to the area.  Next time we see them I'm gonna ask.

The grounds are on the south edge of Casa Grande and I imagine when it was built it must have been in the country.

The boy lived in a nice place on the North edge of town.  It's a new subdivision - very grand, but in a different way than the girls home was.  Big man-made lake there, coupla parks,playgrounds, etc.  He was nice, talked a bit too softly like I did when I was his age, so I kinda recognize why he does it.  I'd like to inform him of the cause and what to do about it, but of course I can't do that, mores the pity.

Nice kids.

NONSEQUITURS ABOUND

Blog number   183                                                              06 June 2008

Well, it's the Sixth of June again and how soon we forget.  Didn't D-day used to be a big thing?  Nothing in the paper, no special programs or movies on the telly.  Nothing.  Well, I guess we don't commemorate the Battle of Gettysburg or the downfall of the Hapsburgs or Bastille Day anymore either.  I think what it is, is that history really belongs to the people that lived during it.  Yes?  Oh, yeah - and also to academics, but of course an academic lives in world denied to us mortals.

I turned on to my computer and booted up my blog to talk about my birdies, but putting the date on jogged mine memory and made me digress.

The two chicks flew off - one yesterday and one this morning.  At least he was still in the nest when I took a flashlight and looked last night and he wasn't there this morning.  I checked the perimeter of the back yard this morning before I let the bird-killer out because mourning dove chicks have a habit of waiting by the fence for a cat.  Any cat - they don't care.  I thought it was because they couldn't fly good, but now I think it is because it is "home."  I'll wait two more days before I feel I don't have to chaperone Zipper on his morning walks any more. 

I have noticed that since I haven't let Zipper run free back there, that we have a lot more birds - one species I have never seen before.  It chirps like a hummingbird, but flits like a wren and looks a lot like a sparrow except the beak is sharper and the bird is much smaller.  We also have more lizards.  I have caught Zipper with lizards before.  I think he just plays with them - rough play, of course.  I don't think they taste good enough to eat.  Maybe.  I have no proof, just a hunch.

I didn't get a baby fix yesterday and it makes a difference.  Maybe today.

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY

Blog number   182                                                              03 June 2008

What is the difference between throwing 500 babies into a fire and throwing fire from airplanes on 500 babies?  There is none.  -- Captain Philip S. Mumford

SOME GOOD OL' DAYS ARE DIFFERENT FROM OTHER GOOD OL' DAYS

Blog number 181 03 June 2008

During the good war, you couldn't buy roasted peanuts - don't ask me why, so if you wanted a peanut-like snack, you had to settle for roasted soybeans. They came in packets like peanuts, and the first few tasted pretty good, but after a few, the taste got kinda nasty. I was never able to eat a whole package at once like I could easily do with peanuts.

In Des Moines there was a black-coated long bearded man - surely a Jew, that used to come around with a cart buying paper, rags, grease, rubber - almost anything. Metals too. A living stereotype which I recognized as such even at the age of ten or eleven. Of course I didn't think of him as a stereotype - I didn't know what that word meant, even. I just knew he was exactly like the idea of a Jewish rag picker.

The corner Mom and Pop store stored - I guess they bought and sold, old rubber tires. We used to play in the stacks. You could go way down deep into a pile of tires. Occasionally you would get a little wet from water in them, but thankfully, Iowa doesn''t have black widow spiders, 'cause they sure would have been in there.

Lots of memories goIng around in my head just now, but seems like too much work to write about them. Things like Tarzan movies and Bud Cathewood getting caught by a barber for trying to steal money from the cash register and complaining because the barber said he tried to steal cigarettes too and Bud swore he didn't. Bud seemed real pissed at the barber for lying. Getting caught stealing money didn't bother Bud at all.

Lots of memories.

BIRDS OF A FEATHER LLOYD, BIRDS OF A FEATHER

Blog number   180                                                              01 June 2008

We gots a mourning dove nesting in our nectarine tree in the back yard.  She was out there last year, hatched something that we never got to see because some night animal got it.  Coulda been our cat, Zipper.  This year I'm keeping him inside and when I do let him out, I follow him everywhere and when he gets too close to that tree, I pick him up and carry him inside.  I caught him earlier this year sniffing at one of the eggs.  He's quick.  And sneaky.

We had mourning doves in Sacramento, but they seem more flighty than the ones out here.  Maybe because of a hunting season in Sacramento.  We took my nephew, Mark and his wife, Julie out to dinner at this restaurant that has a cactus garden out back and a museum of desert stuff that the owner inherited (as well as the house that houses the restaurant).  One of the things most fascinating to me was one of those old dynamite plungers that you used to see in those old black and white Westerns.

We four were out back looking at all the different cactuses and Mark says, "Look at this."  He was standing about a foot from a nesting mourning dove at eye level.  I had already passed that cactus, I didn't see the bird.  We stared at it for a while, it stared back.  You really can't see where it's looking because its eyes are solid black.  But you can tell.

Our bird in the back yard is like that.  I mow the lawn right under it, I go out and pick nectarines all around its nest, I go out and look first thing in the morning and several times a day.  Never flies away.  And its nest is at eye level too.

There are two young 'uns.  I saw them a couple of times when the mother left to eat.  They have small heads and great big black eyes and they never move while you are looking.  I have never heard a sound from them, never seen them rustling around.  They are so cute!

The neighbor that Teresa suspects flattened our tire so's she could talk to me had two of these birds nesting in her eaves right after we moved in.  They were right outside the side door of the garage.  I told her about them because I thought she would be excited, but I found out later that they tore the nest down "because we don't want pigeons nesting in the roof tiles."

They came back this year and were looking like they were going to nest again.  This time I didn't say anything, but she mentioned them again - and about them being pigeons.  I told her they weren't pigeons.  She said, "Well, what are they then?"  I told her they were mourning doves and that supposedly they brought good luck.  I made that part up, about them bringing luck.  It didn't help anyhow because the birds are gone and I know they didn't leave without cause.

I once saw a cop show where this lady had a big, big snake on her porch and when the cops captured it, one of them smashed its head and killed it.  Sheesh!  Sometimes humans irritate the shit out of me.