Category Archives: General

January 30, 2009

A lonely blogger types his fingers to the bone

A lonely blogger types his fingers to the bone


I’m still thawing out and look forward to Friday’s expected high temperature around 60. I don’t have a lot to talk about except that I hope you noticed that I learned to “jump” my posts so that the page loads faster and you can scroll down to previous posts more quickly. You are clicking the “read the rest of the entry” thingy at the end of the posts, aren’t you? In other exciting blog news, I’ll be updating and revising my blogroll at the right — the sites that I link to. I’ve let them get seriously out of date. Before I do that, however, I want to hear from my readers whether they ever use the blogroll at all. Do you ever use my page to jump to another site by hitting one of the links on the right? I suspect many of you do not, for whatever reason. What can I do to be helpful and useful? Do you want links to Google, Yahoo, MSNBC, memeorandum, reddit, Digg, FARK or some other news aggregator? Should my personal blogroll of MCARP, Flibbi, Mary or my daughter be first and foremost? Does anybody care? Am I shouting in the wind to no one?
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January 27, 2009 (updated)

My yucca plants covered with ice and snow

My yucca plants covered with ice and snow

THERE’S SNOW BUSINESS IN OKC

Since the courthouse is closed today due to the weather “emergency”, I thought I’d take time from being bored at the house and maybe do a little blogging since I’ve not really written anything since the Inauguration on the 20th, a week ago. Before he tells you all about it, I’ve got to admit to a tiny bit of cruelty: I laughed and laughed and could not make myself come to the rescue of Sinatra late yesterday afternoon when he found himself in the middle of an icy driveway and couldn’t get any traction. Have you ever seen a cat lose its footing? I don’t think that happens often, or at least I don’t see it often, and watching my “snow cat” floundering just struck me funny. So funny, as it happens, I couldn’t keep my own footing well enough to go rescue him. When I finally got to him to pick him up and carry him back inside, he was PISSED. Fortunately for me, it was nothing a good petting and a little canned food wouldn’t assuage.

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January 20, 2009

I’m glad I watched the inauguration alone because I’m not sure I could have kept my composure around other people.

Watching today, I could not help but think of the many moments in my life that led to this day. I vividly recall the “Colored” and “Whites Only” signs in the Woolsworth’s stores of the old South. I personally saw race riots and demonstrations. The Voting Rights Act passed as I looked on. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I have a dream” speech as I looked on. As a college freshman, I despaired as first Robert Kennedy and then MLK were shot down in 1968. This day seemed so far away in the future then. Continue reading →

January 16, 2009

I READ THE NEWS TODAY, OH BOY

The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema

A psychotherapist analyzes Hitchcock and David Lynch.

Dead Cats in a Bag

More proof that Salvadore Dali was a photorealist, NOT a surrealist.

Bushies Burrow into Bureaucracy

Bush incompetence gets Civil Service protections

TODAY’S THOUGHT

Stop trying to control.
Let go of fixed plans and concepts,
And the world will govern itself.

Stephen Mitchell translation of Tao te Ching
No. 57

GRANDCHILD CUTENESS ALERT

GK sews on a Daisy patch wearing rose colored glasses
image-1380

GK sews on a Daisy patch wearing rose colored glasses


My daughter has a whole series of pictures of my grand-daughter, GK, in her post today over on Mom-A-Tron
The two of them take on a project that involves sewing patches on Daisy uniform shirts and putting an orange (?) stitch into the hat she’s wearing. Why she’s wearing rose colored glasses is a mystery, but I find them quite becoming. Fetching, even. If I’ve done this correctly, you can click on the picture of GK and some kind of internet computer magic stuff will happen. Or not. Continue reading →

January 15, 2009

A cool cat with blue eyes. Call him Sinatra

A cool cat with blue eyes. Call him Sinatra


So, last night he leaves me all alone so he can go to his hey-hey meeting and tonight he brings people over with all kinds of dog and cat smells all over them traipsing through my feeding room and into my wool throne room where they all sat around with the flickering square noisemaker. I’m either bored or overstimulated with not much in between. Since I have to barf anyway, I’m going to throw up right in front of the watering hole he refreshes every time he gets out of bed. I intend to remain steadfast in L’Resistance until he returns the better weather and the baby birds. Vive la chat!

January 13, 2009

JUST A SHORT ONE TODAY

BECAUSE I SAID SO

BECAUSE I SAID SO


I went to the gold dome last night for the jazz. It’s great to be there at 10 p.m. to 10:30 to see the OCU students arrive and hug and chatter and drink. I like the atmosphere. The jazz can be very good or merely adequate and that’s part of the joy of live performance. Last night, a full squad played Coltrane’s “Giant Steps” and the song is so well known that, although they had never played together, it was really really good. However, therein lies the problem for a grandfather like me. Just about the time the jazz and crowd get together, say, 11 when everyone’s there who’s going to get there and they’ve all hugged and squealed and are finally settled in to listen and get into it and musicians are feeling it and feeding back through the crowd, lawzee!, this old geezer is thinking about comfortable houseshoes and brushing his teeth. I’ve sat there and filled a notebook with verbal descriptions of the room on Monday nights. I don’t know the names of any of them, nor, really, anything about them other than most of them are music or theatre majors at OCU. But, you don’t have to be Margaret Meade to observe some well-worn behaviors, those who are friends and who’s pretending, the competitions for attention, who’s coupled up, that sort of thing. I have a whole “soap opera” script for these kids, the waitstaff and musicians going on in my head every Monday. But, tonight, I’m just too tired for more than this.

January 11-12, 2009

BETTY BOWERS SINGS “STRAIGHT TO HELL”

TODAY’S THOUGHT

I READ THE NEWS TODAY, OH BOY

Russian crown jewels buried in Gobi Desert?

DEATH DELIVERS A GUT PUNCH

BECAUSE I SAID SO

BECAUSE I SAID SO


I just about keeled over this weekend when my friend Lynne X told me that a mutual friend had died. The obituary:
Jack Hiatt is dead at 59
Jack was Student Council president and I was senior class president at Classen High School in 1967. We were pretty close, as I had been to his older brother, David, who was a senior and my debate partner my sophomore year. Jack dated a woman I just adored, Diana Dane, our senior year. He and I went to the drive in movie with our first bottle of Wild Turkey and you all know I had a love affair with that bottle for the next 30 years. He came to at least one of our class reunions and he was much the same except that he had something of a hearing loss in one of his ears. Even that was many years ago. I’m really really in denial. I just can’t believe it. Jack was flat out one of the smartest people I ever met in my entire life and left Classen to go to MIT, where he graduated in aerospace engineering. I’ve had other classmates die, but this one really goes to the heart of my youthful memories. Jack, rest in peace and God’s blessings on your soul. This is the second time in a short time that I’ve blogged about deaths that personally affected me. Getting older is not for sissies.

SINATRA SPEAKS

A cool cat with blue eyes. Call him Sinatra

A cool cat with blue eyes. Call him Sinatra


Thanks for the note and the wet food, Muffy, always appreciated. He’s being wierd today. He says it’s all right to pounce the little brown birds washing and drinking in my yard but not the little blue birds. Doesn’t he know I’m color blind? I don’t get the big deal about death. I’m alive. Death is not now, it’s when it is. Birds die and cats live and rule the world. That’s the natural order of things. Birds die according to which ones fly away and which ones let me get close, not according to their color or what he prefers.
No wonder cats rule the world.

FOR NO GOOD REASON

Lenny Welch sings his 1963 classic “Since I Fell for You”