A Blog After a Bears De Feet

Hello there, fans and devotees. It has been a while since there has been a blog from us here in the middle west, but I know you have been waiting patiently. I started a long blog a couple of nights ago and had it about ready--and hit a wrong button and wiped out the whole thing. This is a new and revised blog. The Bears got beaten by the cursed Patriots in a very exciting 4th quarter, and the announcers in the Fox booth got into a trashing of how bad Grossman had been all season (after they spent all season trashing Orton), but the Bs still have a good win record this season, so life goes on. I should look up how the Bs did in 1947--that may have been a bad year also; I like to have a head full of Bears lore.
Betty Comden and Anita O'Day(one created great music and one sang great songs greatly)both passed away last week. There has been general chaos and mahem in Iraq; the su's and shi's have been killing each other is mass quantities. One of the Gemayels in Lebanon was assassinated (memories of the civil war in the 80's). Kramer gave out with some racial slams at a comedy club, and Hugo Chavez says that he is going to bring down the US. Lots more stuff has happened since the last blog, but Drudge has the record of world events on his site, and I have a load of news websites bookmarked, to look into when I have a lot of time to go through them, maybe when the first blizzard in the heartland snows us in. It has been hazy and fairly warm here all weekend. I know this summary of world events will not really inform my readers of what has been going on, but sometimes human doings whelms me. Last night Kasick on FoxNews had Dennis Miller give a little talk at the end of K's show and Miller weighed into the Dems for playing around with issues such as minimum wages, and not doing what they should be doing--which is defending the country from the next terrorist attacks. I am finding it interesting that the mainstream TV media have done nothing yet with the news about the Indian engineer working for the Air Force who may have given our secrets about how the stealth bomber is built to the Chinese. Oh yes, there is all the news about the Russian spy in England who died very painfully from some kind of radiation pill slipped into him; the news at first was he had been fed poisoned sushi. I need to look into this story more deeply than I have had time to do this weekend. It was 43 years ago this past Friday that JFK was shot, and the date seems to have passed by the news media--maybe because so much stuff has been happening right now. Oh yes, the Aggies beat the Texas 'Horns Saturday--no comments about going to the Chicken Ranch.
I had a good time with the family on Thanksgiving, and we had ham and buffalo and sweetpotato pie, among other tasty rations.
Friends, I am going to wind up this blog for right now, even though all I have done is rehash some news briefs I think are interesting. Must go to work in the early morning, even though my body clock still seems to be out of sync after a holiday off last Thurday; maybe the dark nights of November have something to do with this. Anyway, you all take care. Di di mau!

Postelection Bears Triumph Blog Entry

We lost congress but won the Game Sunday, pounding the NYGiants. So I should be happy, even though that makes my life priorities seem peculiar. Thursday we got our first snow, even though it mainly big wet sleet flakes, which soon disappeared from the streets.
I went home this weekend to visit the family, and we all had a good time.
There is not much to opine upon, even though I have strong feelings about how the election came out. I have expressed my feelings in previous blog entries. I just hope the winning party does not open the doors of America to whatever groups want all of us dead, so that they can reshape the world according to their holy book.
I did not know that Murtha had been involved in Abscam 26 years ago. Danny Ortega is going to be back running Nicaragua (he won by ballot not bullet this time) and rumors are floating that Castro may be dead by the end of the year.
I do not know how Drudge and Hewitt and the pajamasmedia bloggers Do It every day--sorting out all the news that comes across the wires(old fashioned phrase, aint it?) and telling us what it all means.
This is a very jerky disorganized blogging tonight, I know. My fingers are not working on the keyboard and I am ashamed that I do not know the full inside story of all the news that is occcuring as I type. Some guy on the radio this p.m. said that most people only listen to the daily news for ten minutes a day, and that is all the world info they get. Maybe true, but I try to get Some information, but tomorrow another load of info will come through, and we are expected to absorb that, and then the next day more stuff...
After a nice few days off from work I start back at the routine tomorrow morning. Whine! No, I am not going to whine about being employed.
This is going to be all for right now, for I must try to get some sleep before work. So, you all take care. Di di mau!

Election 06 is History

I did get to the polling place yesterday morning and Voted, and since the results started coming in last night I have been in bed sucking my thumb in unstoppable grief. No! I took the news in a manly manner and assumed that in a democracy one group wins and one group loses--even though I am not happy. I Will Survive--Hey Hey!
The whole cyberspace world is loaded with people commenting on the election results, so there is probably no reason for me to spill out my internal rage at the way the American voters chose their leaders yesterday.
And then--Rummy quit! Words cannot express my thoughts on that historic disaster to the nation. So, I will go intellectual and ask all my fans and devotees to read many books on civilian-military relations through history, starting with the ways Stalin dealt with his Marshalls, and the whole history of Lincoln, Stanton, and the Civil War Generals, and then the way Polk and the Mexican War Generals got along with each other. I did not want Rummy to go away!
I looked at some European newspapers online to see how they are covering the US election, even though I do not read French and German very well. By the way Prison Break is a popular show on French TV, and Brittny Spears' divorce is being covered in Europe. And I once had to take so many classes on the glories of European culture.
I really am in a kind of grouchy mood tonight after the election. My Ma was wondering why I am being so crabby today. And I had to promise to get over it and not fall into the traits of a late uncle who was mad all the time about something or other for years.
This has actually been a wonderful Nov. day--with temps in the low 80s in the afternoon. So the shorts came out of the closet and got worn one more time. They were very happy, as were my legs.
I think this is going to be all for right now. I have vented my views on the events of today and yesterday, and if the Dems are now in Power that is our system of peoples' govt. We will see what they do. So, you take care. Di di mau!

Election Tomorrow Oh Wow

ABC Nightline is right now doing a piece on Obama, which is so much of a love-in that I am about ready to gag. So much for network news impartiality. The guy is being revealed as absolute perfection and all-knowingness. Just my own private cynical opinion.
Have been drowning all day in TV campaign ads and they are still being shown at 11 p.m and getting meaner as the night goes on. Even people running for state and local offfice are being shown as the most evil creatures to appear on earth. Probably nothing new about all this; Washington and Andy Jackson got the same treatment, and Mary Lincoln got worse press than Abe got.
Back in the late 90s when Clinton was on the hot seat the chat rooms I used to spend my time being in got a lot of comments that there was nothing wrong with pols being sexually and financially corrupt--because the French pols did it all the time, and the French could not get why Americans were so bent out of shape about what our pols got caught doing. That excuse had not worked when Clarence Thomas was being grilled, but it was the excuse Clinton devotees were using for their hero.
A guy from Iowa who had been through West Point and was in the 101st Airbourne got killed in Iraq the other day. He must not have studied hard enough in school to avoid getting sent over there.
I am getting bitterer and bitterer as this blog goes along, even though I am watching Jimmy Kimmel, who is actually very funny and not quite as bitter as Letterman usually is. Maybe I will watch Jimmy before bedtime more than I usually do.
This blog is not really going anywhere, but I felt like venting my profound thoughts in cyberspace, if someone on earth might actually find this blog.
I will have much more to opine upon tomorrow evening after I watch the election returns. It will be an interesting and deep blogging, I guarantee that to my fans and devotees. So, di di mau!

Just Swingin'

Really tasteless title for this blog, making fun of the destiny of Saddam Hussein. The people in his home town are furious and threatening more violence in Iraq (what else is new?) The Iranians are actually glad about his death sentence-considering the 8 year war with them he started, and assorted commentators are claiming that Bush ordered the Iraqis to sentence him to death to get votes for the Republicans in the Tuesday elections.
It had to happen some time--the BEARS finally lost a game this afternoon--getting pounded by the Dolphins 31-13! I will be grown up and accept that everybody loses an NFL game sometime, but the Bears have been on a roll after 25 years of being dishrags, and maybe next week they will Win again; we have a Super to win in February in Miami.
This seems to be a very slow moving ritual of typing a blog entry; I have been droopy all weekend. Nothing emotional hampering living this weekend, but I have a cold and a sore back and leg, and even with wonderful weather I have sagged around for 3 days, and have tomorrow off from work, and have a lot of cleaning up in the apartment I need to do and some money matters at the bank I need to take care of, so the stuff should get done before the day the snow actually begins falling and winter begins.
The election campaign has one day to go, and then we will be rid of the mean political ads trying to convince us that the Other Guy is the most evil creature ever born. I am going to vote a straight ticket for my party.
Some thoughts on the TV preacher (Haggard)who got caught with drugs and a boyfriend, and like Jimmy Swaggart confessed his sins to his followers. That is what you are supposed to do as a Christian, but if he had not been caught he would have just kept on sinning and trying to keep getting away with what he was doing. Whatever you are doing, stop it, and do not wait to get caught.
With that somewhat haughty and smug opinion, which I need to get rid of myself and with prayer, I am going going to put this blog to bed, and should have more to send into cyberspace next time I appear. Di di mau!

Cold Thursday P.M. Musings

Not an attention-grabbing title, but it sets the time and climate. Cold and windy all day and into the night, but the weekend may produce temps in the 70s; shorts and sandals time, maybe.
I have not blogged for a couple of days while Kerry has the center of contention, but he did "apologize" and now we all can move on to Sy Hersh's speech in Canada (on Drudge), in which he trashed US troops in Iraq as being the most violent in American history, and they deserved to be called baby killers when they get home. (There was more in the same vein.) Apparently his listeners at McGill U. lapped up what he said.
Not a great night on TV. Earl was more silly than funny (even with Rosanne as a mean old lady who thought Earl was the voice of God), The Office was not very funny (even with being about diversity clashes between Americans and Hindus), and OC was a droop. And the political adds are getting meaner day by day.
On to Kerry! If he had said the college kids he was talking to that they should study, and then do something for the country, even to joining the military and taking their turn on the line, instead of planning to spend their lives in cubicles, I might have forgiven him, but he fell into the Dems' vision of going back to some warm fuzzy peaceful Clinton-style era. (Jack and Bobby-for all their faults-were about doing something outside of yourself). (We cannot go back to the mythical Clinton age if we wanted to; the Moslems are not done planning to kill everyone on earth.)
I should more to opine about, but my lower back to starting to hurt again, as it has been doing for the last several days. Everyone at work is wheezing and sniffling with the first winter colds, and I may be getting one. Aint this a cheerful blog tonight; nothing but moaning. When things get a little more cheerful tomorrow maybe I will give a more cheerful blog. Take care. Di di mau!

Monday Night Life and Thoughts

This day did not start out as a good session at work this morning. I felt lousy, probably due to the diabetes, and had a whine and grouch session that still embarasses me 20 hours later. I hate it when I act like that, at my age, and did a prayer period when I got home, to ask that I not do such stuff again. I probably should not put my private prayer news into cyberspace, but I am still ashamed of how I behaved.
Michael J. Fox was at the local very liberal college tonight, and gave a brief talk (5 minutes) on stem cell research, and a large crowd cheered him. I took an early evening nap and missed much of the early evening news, but what I got was more of the same events everywhere that happened yesterday. 25 Iraqi day job seekers were killed in one place in Bag., and the Pakistan air force bombed a madrass and killed either 80 Talibans or a lot of school boys. (Could have been the same.) The Pak military says they were out to kill Zawahari. No one is agreeing what the Truth was.
I woke up in time to finally watch an episode of Prison Break, and may get hooked on it on Monday nights.
Found an interesting site all about radio soap operas. Interesting section on the radio soap Portia Faces Life. Portia was a dynamo woman lawyer (an oddity 60 years ago). When the soap began to lose ratings in the early 50s and faced getting cancelled someone got the idea to get listeners by having Portia thrown in jail--and then the show was cancelled, and Portia never was let out of jail. And there was the over-35 Helen Trent who in c. 30 years on the air never got laid, even though a horde of men all tried to get her and jilted her, but good old Gil always sat at home and waited for Helen to return from her latest failed fling at romance.
After this rambling I am going to let my readers get some sleep, and I will try to get some also. It is supposed to be nice weather conditions on Tuesday, but the wind is howling around the corner of my domicile, so we are porbably in for another windy day. You all take care wherever you may be. Di di mau!

Just a Blog on a Sunday Morning in October

OK, that is a really blah title for a blog, but this is being created at 12:30 a.m. on a dark Sunday morning after I have been working at the job on Saturday night, and am home and do not feel yet like going to bed or turning on Fox News. The weather was great tonight--clear skies, a bright moon, and just warm enough to feel like October should feel, after the whole month being dreary. The stray black cat who hangs around the area of where I work was out tonight on a mouse hunt. Wind storms out east, and snow in the Rockies, and Santa Annas in California, and a nice day in the midwest. More of the same old same old in Korea and the Mideast; that is probably not really true--things keep moving toward some kind of resolution in both regions, but after a while it appears that the same stories keep coming out of the hot spots we have heard before. Maybe people had the same idea in the 1930s--ho hum, Hitler wants another territory. Things did move toward a big resolution in that ongoing situation.
Nebraska got beat today by OSU and tomorrow at noon the BEARS meet the 49ers. I should get out and around town tomorrow afternoon and buy a new cheap watch at Wlmrt to replace the cheap one I have that I cannot change the time back an hour on, and I need to get an oil change, and defrost the frig. This is not a very readable or interesting blog entry, is it. Well, that is what the weekend is this weekend. I do not have a great website I have found today, or read any deep books, or seen any really great movies. Avoid a movie called Into the Blue (with Paul Walker and Jessica Alba) if you want a gripping profound story line. But it does have very pretty scenery of the Bahamas and beautiful blue water and actors with great bodies in scimpy swim wear.
Dear readers, I am going to bed in a little while, and I hope to eventually have a really great blog entry for you. World events currently seem much more important than my own private life, and I suppose everything will break out into Clauswitzian violence. Try to find something cheerful in your lives to hold on to. So, Di di mau!

Idontneednogoofytitle

From what I have heard, most people go out Somewhere on Friday night to have a good time at the end of the week. Well, I went to bed on this Friday night just as soon as it got dark, and I slept several hours and missed Linus and the Great Punkin, and I did not wake up till the local news was about over, and at the end of the bcast the sports honcho mentioned that the Cardinals had won the Series. No great excitement and no scenes of happy people, just a mention. Maybe that shows how much baseball has dropped down from being the national game--no one is really excited. Apperently the Cards did not do their routine of falling apart sometime in the Series, like they have done before, and they got their act together this year and held together.
W was in town yesterday in the middle of the rain and gave a speech for a local congressional candidate, and the tickets to get in to see him for a hundred bucks. We were so busy at work that the arrival in town of the Prez was not something we had the time to stop and be breathless about.
And I went to bed early last night and missed Earl, and did not get a chance to dig into the news of the day, except for some news about the fires in California and the loss of several firefighters. Once in a while we need to get reminded that not everyone in the US works in a cubicle, looking at a screen. I would like to have a dream job of getting paid to spend all day looking at websites, but no one has invented that job for me where I toil. I spend a lot of time standing up working over a tabletop. Maybe it is good for my legs to stand up all day.
I do have a cold from being out in the rain yesterday, and I am up now on early Saturday morning, and checking for some news, and there is an issue going on about Jim Webb's porno novel, and the flap over whether Michael Fox turned his Parkinson's symptoms (I almost typed "his jerks") into a show for Couric, and whether Rush is being a jerk about whether Fox went off his medication to make a show, is taking up a lot of time in the media. Get this awful campaign season over with. And another issue is whether it was racist in a campaign ad to have a white bimbo talk about Harold Ford going to a Playboy party.
After all this recording of a smidgen of the current events I am going to sign off for now. I have a hectic weekend to get through, and there are several million websites I have not looked at yet, and I might just take another nap. So, all of you fans and devotees of my blog sit tight and I will be back next time. Stay dry and cool. Di di mau!

Hoowa, Another Blog

This may not be a very long blog, due to that I am burned out on politics and have little to grouse about tonight--not that I could not, but it has been a busy day, and what our Leaders have been doing has been done without any of them calling me today and wanting my opinion. Not W, not Nejad, not Kim Il, not anyone at all. The political ads are still coming thick and fast on TV, and now we are getting ads for and against candidates for the state leg., and assorted local and county officials, besides the ones running for governor and Congress. Maybe one reason no Leader called me is that I unplugged my phone today, to escape a deluge of pollsters and political telemarketers who have been driving me googy ("they're coming to take me away, haha").
My fans and devotees may notice that I have put some of my favorite websites in my links section. I have got to be careful or I may end up with everything in my Favorites collection in my blog links. I have a vast group of sites I have bookmarked, but these are just a smidgen of the ones I like to check out ever so often or daily. Drudge for breaking news, and Ecola for online newspapers. I have Jazeera in the News section, but need to check it out more than I do, as well as a bunch of news and opinion blogs (Hugh Hewitt et al). It is a miracle of new century technology that all this stuff can be accessed on a pooter, instead of one having to wait for network TV to tell one what is happening on earth. I am a true devotee of the Web.
Right now Dirty Jobs is on TV while I am typing, and I should see what Mike is doing this episode. (He is helping a guy clean a huge church organ, instead of scooping hog shit or road kill.)
Fox News this morning had a segment about the Iranian Special Forces, which Nejad was once a honcho in (an outfit kinda like the Waffen SS, or the Russian Spetznaz), and they at least look fierce while marching. Probably we will have to meet them in combat in the upcoming future.
This is going to be all for right now. It is bedtime--so you all take care till we meet again. Di di mau!

Cold Monday Night

It is cold tonight and supposed to get into the 20s, and I hope my heating system does not freeze. I have probably done too much whining all ready about the droopy October we have been having so far, but I am at the age where I hate winter and cold temps, even though I know this is just Nature doing her usual stuff yearly.
Have been busy all day and night and have not had much chance to learn what has been happening in the world, so I have a certain ignorance tonight. There is a story about CNN having a video from Iraqi rebels showing them ambusing an American patrol, but I do not have all the details of the matter. Mike Wallace years ago did say that as a reporter it would have been his duty to go on patrol with a hypothetical insurgent group to watch them ambush an American patrol, so this CNN matter would be right up his alley.
I need to go to bed, but I have gotten just recently totally hooked on looking at web newssites to see what is online. I do need to actually shut this machine down and escape from its clutches, but their is always some new site to look at. I found just recently an online edition of an ancient Greek book by Diogenes Laertius called Lives of the Philosophers--about the only accounts we have of the lives of Plato and his cohorts. Did you know that Thales died when he fell off a cliff while star gazing, and one thinker(Periander) threw his wife down the stairs and killed her, and made all the women in Corinth burn their clothes, and the guy who took over Plato's Academy(Speusippus) had lice and was a money grubber, and killed himself after Diogenes the Cynic insulted him one day. And Hericlitus died after he covered himself with cow shit to rid himself of dropsy. Lots more interesting stuff in the book to look up.
I do not know if any of this ancient stuff will help me understand Kim Jong or Nejad, but it is interesting anyway. And now the immigrants in France are rioting, and the Moslems in Britain are raging because the govt wants Moslem women to get out of their veils. One day last summer some neareastern guy and his wife came into a Des Moines Walmart and the woman was in a print burkha with only her eyes exposed. No one in the Sunday crowd made an issue I know of over the twosome, but it was of those things where you wanted to tell the man that since he was in Iowa of all places he should learn to get with the local mores, and get his wife out of her sack. OK, I have made my unPC views known on such matters. Let's go on to something else.
The something else is that I am about to wind up this disorganized blog page, and must now leave my fans and devotees for the night and try to get some sleep. I know that many people have much longer and more detailed blog entries than I do, especially when they are writing about politics, but I just do not have that much this evening. I guess the big news issue of the day was the sudden mania with Obama, who may be running for president, since yesterday, and according to one of Clinton's ex-honchos(Mike Curry), is the new JFK, who can channel all the idealism the masses got from Jack 45+ years ago. Oh.
Di di mau!

Not Grouchy & Whiney but Cold

Here is a blog, on a Saturday night, after the day has been a mess of rain, high winds, gloom, and Cold. So much for the beauties of October in 06. Iowa, Iowa State, and Nebraska all got whupped this afternoon. I have not yet checked to see how Kalamazoo did against Wisconsin Lutheran. Kim Jong Il supposedly told the Chinese he was "sorry' for setting off a nuke. Close to a hundred US troops have been killed in Iraq in October. Nejad is back ranting about wiping out Israel and anyone else supporting the country. He is a progressive fellow, aint he? There is lots more world news to relate, but I will have to do more web searching to get it in my diary.
There is an interesting column in the blog The Agitator about who has been Outing who on Capitol Hill, and which congresspeople have Gay aides (bad pun, I know). Back in the 1980s the Des Moines Register got on a vendetta against the bumbo county attorney we had, and after a long campaign in print to get the guy out of office, the paper outed him one day. It was fairly common gossip that he was gay, but he resigned very soon after the story broke. So much for the liberals in Des Moines being Accepting of the gay lifestyle.
The media ads around here for and against local candidates have gotten vicious beyond sense in the last week. Does our current congressman want children to watch porno videos, and can one candidate for governor opine on world affairs since he avoided military service, and who is the bigger porkbarreler(sic). An insult to intelligent voters, but professional campaign agencies seem to think this stuff is effective.
I am going to close this blog effort for right now, before I get higher and higher on my horse. The news of the world is getting heavy on my mind, and I have discovered that I do not remember or even absorb as much of it as I should. Arnaud of the Washington Times thinks that some time soon we will be at War with both Iran and North Korea.
( Great News--Kalamazoo College crowned its Homecoming by whupping Wisconsin Lutheran 31-19! Way to go, Hornets!)
Di di mau!

Toozdi Night at Home

What is the current News about?--earthquakes in the Pacific, Madonna's adopted(?) baby from Malawi, Wesley Snipes on the lam for tax evasion, HRC wearing a diamond-studded cross, Evel Knievel's 68th birthday, at least one of the check-out line tabloids claiming the Bush marriage is collapsing, The Bears pulling off a big win by coming from 0-20 to 24-23 and beating the Cardinals in the last five minutes of the Monday night game!, North Korea declaring war on anybody messing with it and its nukes. Lots more heavy stuff you can find on the major news websites.
Cold and foggy and windy and damp day around the heartland region. This has become an ugly October instead of a pretty fall season with colored leaves and warmish temps. And I am not feeling well health-wise this week, with diabetic droops. Whine and whine.
While shopping this afternoon I noted that Big K and Wally have raised the price of t-shirts and underpants; a sign of inflation or a jump in shipping costs getting them here from China? Wally has big plans to open megastores around China.
I bought a half-price book of English poetry the other day, for my cultural education, and found a couple of poems by a 19th century dude I had never heard of named Coventry Patmore. He wrote a couple of poems that are grabbers when you read them; one is about his feelings when his sick wife died while having tea with him, and The Toys is about him trying to raise his little son without a mother--and having to hit the kid when he was disobedient. Very unusual topics for poems in an age when pseudo-medieval stuff was the main subject. (Patmore died in 1896).
This is going to be all for right now. I have some pre-bedtime things to do. You all take care and we will blog again. Di di mau.

Crabby & Fussy on a Dreary Sunday Night

My blog titles are really great draws for readers, aint they? This has actually been a dreary day--overcast and windy and drizzly. The local weatherman on TV says we will get rain all week.
Some doofus in eastern Iowa shot all five members of his family over the weekend, but he was picked up in Quincy Illinois this morning. The Des Moines Marathon was held today and screwed up traffic all over the north half of town all morning and half the afternoon. I spent a lot of the day at home. I should be inspired by the idea of a mob of runners fit enough to do the big run, but my leg and back have been sore all weekend and so I have been snitty at anyone doing anything. Whine and whine. Clinton was quietly slipped into town last night to speak at the big Democrat banquet held at the local auditorium. I do not like the guy at all, so I was not thirsting for him to be just a few blocks from my hootch, and the Fox News shows all this morning were full of Dems, including Kerry, griping that W should have had more talks with Dear Leader Kim. They never explained what you talk about to convince KJIl not to build a nuke. I have a thought that no pundits or American "leaders" have much idea of Korean history or culture. Maybe a reading of how the Panmunjom talks were done in '53 would be helpful for how to talk to Koreans.
Back to work in the morning, as usual. I would like to retire, but need to keep cash coming in to live on, so I do not end up living in a tent on the riverbank. Lots of things I would like to do if I could retire, but need money for even these dream projects.
Including the family shot in Bonaparte, ten people were murdered in Iowa this weekend, most in little farm towns. One guy in Des Moines was stabbed to death.
With all this happy stuff on this blog tonight, I am going to depart now. You all find some happiness, and I will try to find some too. Di di mau!

Grouchy and Whiny Part Two--Frigid in October

Cold in the midwest again today--due to the North Pole winds blowing across the plains. And when the sun goes does the temp is due to get down to freezing. (I went to bed before I finished this posting and so what follows is being typed on Friday night instead of Thursday night.)
It is now a dark and windchilly Friday the 13th p.m. I took a nap after work this afternoon and woke up in time for the No Spin Zone, and have been trying to master the new google beta system I hooked into. I do not like Beta at all. It has been decided by Experts that what NoKo exploded the other day was Nuclear, but how big is still being decided. Liberals across Iowa yesterday must have wet their pants badly when they read the editorial in the DM Register opining that the US has the duty to blow NoKo and Iran off the planet if they try anything violent with their nukes. A shock of an editorial, because the Gannett DM Register is the most peace-loving and military-force loathing rag imaginable. I have been avoiding CNN and Hannity and Colmes due to CNN and Allen Colmes' views of the world. Yes, I am a Pajamas Hawk. LBJ was always speeching about getting Ong Ho Chi Minh to a table and talking out a peace settlement for south Asia ("Come, let us reason together"). It never worked because Ho and Giap were willing to keep feeding their own kids into the fire till they got SVN conquered, some way some time. And they did it.
Please, let it warm up this weekend. I am not ready yet for winter to arrive in the middle of October. Russians and Laps love cold weather, but I am not of their cultures. I can handle the temperatures and even the snow if I have to, but Des Moines has a goofy more cars than streets street system that makes for bad driving in bad weather. Whine and whine!
A family in south Florida were executed yesterday, and their bodies left along the roadside, and whoever did it probably drove off in their car. That is the news I got on that tragedy, so far.
A bunch of cops in Texas had to shoot a stray Emu that was roaming around loose.
O'Reilley had a guy on tonight who went to the Mexican border south of Brownsville to see if he could sneak across the border; he rode an elephant across the Rio and had a loud mariachi band with him playing loudly, and no border guards showed up to check what was going on.
This is going to be all for right now. Di di mau!

Grouchy and Whiny

It has finally become cold and rainy and gloomy in the midwest and the streets are slick--a preview probably of the next several months, and I have a cold already and went to bed early in the afternoon and slept through all the news shows, so I actually do not know the details of what happened today in the world. I guess we have not yet blasted NK off the earth. I went through a few news blogs and sites this evening to see what the opining on things were. There seems to be an idea that NK is about to collapse as a society and we should wait for the starving people to rise up and kill KJIl and his generals and become a free people in one swoop, and then the world will be a little safer place. Would be nice if that happened in the next few weeks, but it will probably not happen.
I did wake up long enough to finally watch Help Me Help You with Ted Danson--funny show, but is basically Becker as a shrink. I should rent a Dr. Katz dvd some time. And I did watch tonight's Boston Legal. I am beginning to like that show. Kirk, Murphy Brown, Odo, Henry Gibson, and Betty White, and James Spader--what a cast in one show.
The old longhorn steer used as a mascot for the Texas Longhorns died yesterday. What can I say?
Nothing more to convey to you all at this time; I hope to have some more drudgetype news bits culled from the web the next time I blog. I need to look up some football scores from some teams I am interested in, but it will take a little time to search the web to find all the stuff I want for my newsposts. Keep waiting--and I will have some great stuff for you soon. So Di di mau!

Post Big Blast Columbus Day Blog

OK, fans and devotees, we will get to the North Korean nuke blast in a little bit. The temp in the heartland has started to move toward coldness today. We are supposed to get to temps in the 20s in a few days. I am not at all ready for that, even though I have been collecting flannel Earl shirts and coats and blankets for a month or so. And I am in long pants. Please do not let shorts weather go away just yet. Whine and whine.
I have an idea to start making this blog a micro drudge report, with bits of news from all over picked out from news web sites, but it may take time to get infobits collected. So far, I have the following bits: R. W. Apple, of the New York Times, died at age 71 on Oct. 4: 29 US troops were killed in Iraq in the first week of October: Kalamazoo College Hornets beat Tri State Thunder 33-30 Saturday: Beverly Hills Normans beat the Palos Verdes Sea Kings 26-7. I wanted to list the last game played by Hollywood High-but their website is way off schedule. There is a mess concerning Paul Vance, who composed Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weeny Polka Dot Bikini in 1960. He was supposed to have died a few weeks ago, but it appears that another guy with the same name was the one who died, but both guys claimed to have written the song.
The news came out late last night that NK had finally set off its nuke. So far no one has done anything about it except talk and opine. A lady from Newsweek was on Fox this morning and blamed W for the whole mess--because he did not talk enough to Kim and show him some respect. On Drudge there is a story that there is some question as to whether the blast was actually nuclear, or just a huge load of dynamite. Rush this afternoon broke the rules of PCness and was calling Kim a dog eater.
I am currently watching the Couric show and she is not actually doing a bad job as an anchor.
Old Andy Rooney on 60 Minutes last night mentioned that he did not a great knowledge of geography, by saying that he did not know where Sierra Leone and Sri Lanka were. Odd for him to say such stuff because he has been in the news business since WW2 and has been all over the world reporting for several decades.
I am going to wind up this thing right now. There will be lots more on Nkorea as the days go by, or it will fizzle out as an issue. You all take care. Di di mau!

Big Bears Win Sunday Night Blog

OK dear fans and devotees; here is a blog finally, after skipping almost a week. The Amish schoolhouse massacre, the Foley mess, the North Korean nuke matter, Castro's cancer, and floods in Virginia are some of the events of the last week. And there was a flurry about a story that Laden may have died. And Anna Nicole's baby and who's the daddy of the little angel should or should not be included. Especially since one of the guys involved is named Howard K. Stern. And Fox News is hyping itself this week on its 10th anniversary. The grocery store tabloids are telling stories that there is something suspicious about the death of the Crock Hunter. My back and tailbone have been hurting all this week and I have been tired from work and gone to bed early all week. Some time I will get some time to look at the huge bunch of news websites I have bookmarked, but there are so many websites to look at I feel crushed by all the stuff. Don't know if someone has an article online on getting Crushed by the Web. So much stuff online to read that I feel like I have dropped the habit of actually reading an actual book or a real newspaper. And I have gotten out of the habit of watching tapes of movies. Davis and Stanwyck and Fonda (Henry) and Lombard may be wondering if I am going to get back to watching their films. Things may get warm in Des Moines in the cold of next Feb.--when Jane Fonda comes to town to give a speech to the regional liberal women. The D. Chicks finally cancelled their concert here in August, when ticket sales tanked. Toby Keith is due in town on Nov. 11, to sing the Dave song (I'm Not As Good As I Once Was) and his other hits. I have found a bunch of bloggers who specialize in Iowa politics; I wish I could follow the political events in my own state closer, but just do not have the time to devote my whole life to the stuff.
This is going to be all for right now. Hopefully I will have something more Deep to write next time. Di di mau!

Is There Any Goodness in the World?

A nice warm, but humid, day in October, and the beauties of Autumn are around us, but I have a gloomy title for my blog, since I am having a blues session after some creep killed a bunch of Amish kids in their school in Pennsylvania, just a few days after some other creep did the same thing at a school in Colorado. So far no one has made political hay out of this. And the news has come back to Iowa that a couple of guys from the great state were killed in a roadside ambush in Iraq a few days ago. Woodward's latest book seems to be destroying what is left of the Bush administration, and suddenly we are in the midst of a pervert scandal in Congress. Even the Washington Times wants Hastert to quit the speakership, for sitting on whatever info he had on Foley for a year. And the WSJ is advocating the same thing. The tapes of OBL with Atta and friends from 2000 seem to reveal that they were making plans for 9-11 regardless of whoever might become President of the US in the upcoming election.
I bought an on-sale DVD of The Court Jester at B&N this afternoon and brought it home and watched it. The Jester is not quite as good as I thought it was when I saw it several years ago. Just a little too full of itself. I am not a hardcore Danny Kay devotee. The guy was multitalented, but a little too obvious about it on screen. None of this may make any sense to my readers. I should see if very many more of his movies are on tape or disk, so I can see more of him.
The Bears Won Big last night, and I am watching the Packers and Eagles go at it on ESPN. The game is finally beginning to get hot in the third quarter.
After a day off from work today it is back to the routine tomorrow, so some sleep should be tackled in a while, after this game is over. After the harvest of death in the US and in the Dar al Islam in the past few days I should say my nightly prayer for Peace, but an amount of realistic sadness may be in order. So--Di di Mau!

Hot October Sunday

Very warm October Sunday in Des Moines--85 degrees. A little more time for shorts and sandals before seasonal reality gets here, and the pounds of winter clothes have to go onto the body for several months. The city seems to be getting a horde of groundhogs into town; I saw several of the cute big things yesterday. Tony Stewart won the race today by driving ahead of everyone else on no gas. Dale Jarrett actually came in in the top five-he aint done nothin for a long time--way to go DJ.
The news today has been all about Woodward's book trashing Rummy, and about the tapes showing OBL and Atta and friends at a Quaeda meeting in 2000. Some blogsites are now claiming that the Dems knew about Foley being a sicko a year ago, and one of Soros' groups leaked the news about Foley, and that the transcripts show Foley's messages to the kid were sick but not actually sexual. Go to Right Wing Nut House and American Thinker to get an explanation of what is going on. And Fatah and Hamas are having a civil war in Ramallah.
Am going to watch at least a portion of the Bears-Seahawks game, which just started. Go Bears!
Is this all that has happened in the last couple of days? Well, a plane crashed in the Amazon jungle and killed 155 people, and a bunch of people were killed in Canada when an overpass collapsed on their cars. There was a brief mention in the Wall Street Journal the other day that Tokyo Rose has died in Manila at age 90. Should look up the story on her on the web in a little while. Not much more to report in this fairly short blog; the news in the world has been very heavy this weekend and I am trying to absorb it all, even if I am lacking in total profoundity about it all. Sorry about that. So, Di di mau for right now. More later.

Blog With No Funny Title

Hello there, gentle readers. A beautiful day in the midwest--blue skies, high 70s heat, and a great day to pick corn. And the Des Moines street crews are out today working to rebuild our ancient street system, right in the middle of the most used sections of downtown in the morning rushhour. The streets need rebuilt, but the traffic was a total chaos this morning. S happens-roll with it and grit your teeth and avoid partial street rage.
Rush L. finally went over the edge this p.m. on his show, by calling liberals and anti-war types "traitors." The T word has been generally kept out of the talk show bloviating, except f0r one brawl last week on Hannity and Colmes, but RL may have thrown it into the dialogue lingo. There is an interesting blog I found put out by Spook 86, an ex-CIA guy, who has some interesting views. And there is an interesting blog (gwb06 blogspot) by a guy who claims he is George W. Bush-the President. Maybe it really is Him.
And this was the day that Season 1 of Mama's Family came out on DVD. I wish I could afford a number of TV show box sets, but my budget is not up to being used for too many of the things. I would like to get each season of Have Gun Will Travel and the first couple of seasons of I Love Lucy(the masterpiece seasons), and the complete series of Amazing Stories, but we will have to see what the budget can handle. I have been e-ing TV Party as to when or if The Millionaire, the Gary Moore variety show, and Brooklyn Bridge will ever be available, but none of them seem to be in the near future. And neither is Ben Casey or The Nurses. A shame for TV devotees. And I am also waiting for It's About Time (with Grunk and Shad) The Hollywood Palace, and Love-American Style.
This is going to be all for now. My fans may be wondering why I am rambling today, but I promise you all a really deep blog masterpiece some time in the near future. Di di mau!

Oh Wow, I am back blogging

Hello there! Everyone in cyberspace has been waiting for me to do another blog entry, since I have not blogged since the end of June. Have been busy working and have been having middle aged broodings, and world events seem to have overwhelmed my small-scale thoughts on What Is Going On. Maybe I can get back into the habit of typing a record of What is Happening, every so many days. The last blog I typed I mentioned something about The NYT Mess, and now I can not remember what the Mess was. Since my June 27 entry North Korea shot off some missiles into the Sea of Japan on July 4, and Israel and the Hezbollah had a war in south Lebanon, and Castro got sick and turned Cuba over to his brother, and Chavez and Nejad came to the UN and trashed W and Hugo C. called W "The Devil," and the Pope made some remarks borrowed from a Byzantine Emperor that Mohammed had done some stuff evil, and the Muslims went wild and are still rioting around the world over the comments, and today some Sunnis blew up a kerosene tanker in Sadr City and killed 3 dozen Shiite women, and today there is a rumor that OBL died of typhoid fever a month ago. I guess those are the big major events of the last three months, and suddenly I cannot remember all the other stuff, including who famous died, and what has been going on in showbiz and celebland. I may have to actually go to our city library and dig into Time to see what else has happened Big. Sorry that everything anywhere important in the world has slipped my mind tonight. The 5th anniversary of 9-11 was commemorated with respect, but the ABC movie about 9-11 stirred up a flap by liberals, because it took Clinton and his regime to the woodshed for not paying attention to catching OBL, and tomorrow on Fox will be an interview by Chris Wallace with Clinton, in which Bill looses his temper about failing to capture the maybe late terrorist.
All this stuff happening day by day is reminding me of 1968, when something Big in the world seemed to occur every day and you got every morning to see what had happened overnight.
Chris Wallace should have asked Clinton not why he could not catch Ladin, but why the gov. had been unable to catch Atta and his gang, who had been in and out of the US for at least 2 years, and someone should slash at the Media for spending more time on OJ than the story of the blind mullah and his band in '93, and there should be a story about why so much time was spent in the summer of '01 on poor Chandra Levy.
OK, I am going to publish this blog now, even though I really do not have any incredible insight into what has been going on outside my room. I am just recording what I remember about the last several weeks of history. Di di mau!

Yes, We Are Still Alive

Yes, we are still on earth--after a gap of several days of not doing a blog. The news of the world seems to be bigger than my little personal report to the cyberuniverse on my private doings, and with maybe 30 million other bloggers I probably got lost in the world population. With war, shootings, east coast floodings, midwest drought, Starr Jones' problems, Rush's viagra bust, North Korea's maybe rocket launch, the death of Frazier's Eddie, the agency financial scandal in Iowa, the Kidman wedding, the Hugh O'Brien wedding, the Pitt baby, the new NYTimes mess, and the World Cup, it has actually been a lively time on earth. Some day all of this news will be old and dusty (like reading old accounts of Ford's presidency) but some of it may end up having historical importance. Now, isn't that a really Deep Thought I just came up with. (prep at the end of a clause).

Coulter has not appeared on TV tonight (wow), but Scarborough had Sheehan on whining, and Bill O' was in rant mode tonight, and Colmes was also whining to Hannity, and I shut the TV off, and will probably go to snoozeland in a little while. I know all this does not make for a Hugh Hewitt-level blog, but that is what my current life is like, in this midsummer of '06. Private life is not moving at an exciting pace. Even the greatest creators in history must have had down days when they did nothing at all Deep (Plato supposedly died at a horse race).

After 2 weeks of not blogging, I seem to have not much to blog about, but I am curently out of the self-pity mood I was in a few weeks ago, so maybe I will have some cheerful stufff to offer all my fans and devotees the next time I come into their laptop screen world. Things will get better--or worse, considering the state of current international events. So, we will see you. Di di mau!

We Need Rain Real Soon

The ground around here is very dry and the rivers are getting low. Great that a warm summer is upon us, but we need rain. Not rain like we got in 92 and 93, but some wet stuff.

Daily life is improving a little since that last blog I printed about my June glooms, but but the local TV is full tonight of nothing but misery in the local region. There was a funeral for the first woman soldier from Iowa to get killed in Iraq, and she left a 9 year old kid behind. There were at least five car or truck crashes today along the interstate. A football player from ISU died of cancer at 24. A little girl in the metroplex has a rare brain stem tumor which will probably kill her in a few months. And after all that sad news PBS ran a bio of Cole Porter which told all about his life with broken legs and his sinking into depression before he died. And I discovered while shopping for groceries how high food prices are going, and it cost 38 bucks to fill my car tank. And I am having troubles with my landlady. And more small town factories in Iowa are closing, and the Wall Street Journal has an article about the millions of kids in America who are going hungry because their families cannot afford to buy food.

I need to get happy or at least less blue, after all that stuff, and am going to work at it. This will be all for right now, after this gloomy news rehash, and need to sleep on it. So you all wait for my next happy blogging. Di di mau!

At Last A New Blog Entry

After deleting at least 3 blogs I started over the last few weeks here is one I hope I will feel like finishing and sending out into cyberspace for my waiting fans and devotees, who have been wondering where I have been, I assume.

Yes, I know--it has been a frantic time on earth--with Zarqawi getting His, however he really got It, and lots and lots of politics being done, and today 3 guys in Gitmo killing themselves, and a hurricane in the Carib.. building up, and the Pitt baby arriving, and on and on, but I have been in a blue funk depression for 2 weeks or more, and my family is in a dysfunction, which I will spare you the details of (preposition at end of clause), and things are not going good partially in my little life, but hopefully things will get better.

After a hot summer week in the midwest, today it got cold and rainy and dreary again, right when a city outdoor winefest is going on, and tomorrow morning a bunch of aging hippies are planning to sit on the banks of our local river and chant to drive pollution away from the river. Lots of Oms and bamboo flute playing, and probably more news crews out than hippies. Should be interesting, if it actually takes place.

The World Cup Soccer finals are on now, and everyone in every other country is going wild over the things, but I can not get excited about them. My American redneckness has me counting down the days till August, when the NFL gets going again, and The Bears are back! Nothing wrong with everyone else on Earth getting deep into soccer, but American profootball is my sport. I was a great Nascar devotee for several years, but have kinda lost interest in it recently. I check out each week who won the race, but do not sit all Sunday afternoon watching the races like I did a few years ago.

Have spent much of tonight reading blogs about Zarqawi, and about the DailyKos leftwing bloggers convention in Vegas, and I need to get ready for a big project I need to take care of tomorrow but am stalling till the last minute. This sadness I am in has all but dried up much eagerness to be active at anything. What is the problem? I wish I knew. I seem to have some kind of emotional crisis right around early June every few years or so, and something not very nice always seems to happen.

Enough of that stuff. You all take care, and I will try to get back to blogging better as this month goes on, and what will happen will be faced in a manly way. Di di mau!

Midweek Thoughts

Well, PBS spent 90 minutes Monday giving us Joseph Goebbels. No strange PBS political views of JG, but nothing but a lot of interesting old film of him, and the voice of Kenneth Branaugh reading excerpts from Geobbels' diaries. Actually not much point as to what the whole show was supposed to be about. Some screen crawls telling the viewer to go to some PBS websites to read what some historians think of Goebbels. Avoid academic historians like the bird flu plague. For all the money PBS gets, they bought a film as unreliable as any thing on the History Channel or any thing on BookTV.

There is a scandal going on in Iowa right now which has become the state entertainment of the summer. Somewhat complicated, but it involves the honchos of a state job-finding agency, who were getting huge salaries. It involves a lady with a GED degree, who took her salary to buy a house boat and entertain her fellow board member boyfriend, and there is a long-time city politico who lots of people have grudges against, and a board member who spent some time in prison for child molestation, and some county officials who were involved in the scandal somehow, and the whole matter gets stranger and stranger as the days go by. The Public can find at least one or more pieces of this matter to be Shocked about, even if you do not understand all of it. Like Watergate, honest people keep being found who got corrupted by something in the scandal.

It is hot and humid in the heartland this afternoon after rain and a lightening storm last night. I wanted a hot summer after a cold spring, and it seems to be getting here, so I am complaining
about how Hot it is. Some people will whine about anything.

Bob Dylan, Tommy Chong, and Priscilla Pressley all have birthdays, in different ages in their 60s.

Around this time of May in 1969 I travelled home on leave from Ft. Lee, going from Petersburg Va. to Omaha on the Northfolk and Western Railroad. Had never been on a trainride before. Meaningless fact to most readers, but the train was one of the last passenger trains in business before Amtrack came in. Very interesting ride with some interesting people I met, but was very slow. Wonder if the old steam trains felt as slow to the people who rode them.

(May 25) Tried to watch American Idol last night but could not get through it to the end. None of the singers who could sing at all did anything to me and I will probably barely follow their stints as celebrities instead of singers. Could make long lists of singers who crashed and burned quickly in opera, country, and pop music who were good but not good enough to sustain a career. Sad, but it happens.

Don't have a lot more to send into siberspace tonight. Lots of world news to absorb, and not much memorable at work today to record for human history. Yes, I know: one should always be alive and alert and ready to grasp the universal uniqueness of every little event that occurs in one's life, but I am not Proust yet, though someday I may try to record the ultimate meanings of pumping gas and buying some bread and soup, and driving in Des Moines in the afternoon traffic. Till then, this will be all for right now. Di di mau!

Friday and Monday Together

Heat has finally arrived; the winds have died down a little, and we may actually be getting an authentic summer. And then we will sit in front of our ice boxes and moan that It Is So Hot!

The season ends of 70s Show and the OC were both not what TV Guide had hyped them up as. 70s spent too much of its last show trying to be funny about Hyde's pot smoking, and OC ended with Marisa getting killed in Ryan's car. I was not moved by either show. Maybe it was because my back is hurting this week. I finally went to bed.

Much going on in the world, but check out Drudge to see what is happening. In August the Dixie Chicks are coming to Des Moines for a concert. There will probably be right and left clashes outside the auditorium, along with demonstrations. Note on May 22: the Chicks are on the cover of Time, and Nat Maines has announced she had retracted some of the nice things she said about W in the near past. The concert should be an exciting event in Iowa.

Now on Monday May 22. The records of at least 26 million veterans have been stolen from the house of a VA employee who took them home with him. Barbaro is on his feet and horny for mares after breaking his leg in the Preakness Saturday. Madonna opened her world tour in LA with a show which featured her on a cross. Nagin got reelected mayor of New Orleans. Another kid in Aruba has been picked up for whatever he knew or did involving Natalie H. A horse farm in Michigan is being dug up in case the bones of Jimmy Hoffa are buried there. The upcoming hurricane season may be another wicked one. The Metropolitan Opera gala for the retirement of Joe Volpe got awful reviews and comments from a website of gay opera fans.

PBS tonight is doing a show on Joseph Goerbbels tonight. Should be interesting to see how PBS portrays Dr. G. considering the strange political leanings of PBS. And King of Queens is supposed to be very good tonight. A lot of network shows I just have never gotten interested in (including Lost, 24, American Idol, and most of the murder-autopsy shows). It's just the way my brain is wired, I guess. Probably nothing wrong with all those shows, but I just can't cram all of them into my activity routine.

This is going to be all for right now. I did not get Friday's blog finished, so this is a combo of Friday and Monday. I keep promising all my fans that I will sometime create the perfect blog, but I am still working on that project. You all take care. Di di mau!

Wednesday and Whatever

At sometime in human history the heartland is going to have a pure summer season, with heat and clear skies and no March-type winds and everyone will not be going around with winter colds. The barn swallows have come back to Iowa from wherever they go south in the fall, and like last year are probably wondering what the hail they flew up to cold and rainy Iowa. The skeeter population should be huge this summer so the barnies will at least have good eating for a few months.

Remember--it is spelled Wednes-day, not Wens-day or Wedens-day.

The stock market took a 200-point dive today. Billionaire Beatle Paul and his wife are splitting up. Is it possible that Jane Asher is waiting in the mist to catch Paul on the third bounce? The guys who played Tom Corbett and Clarabelle the Clown on tv in the '50s both have died. European critics have been trashing The Da Vinci Code, and Ian McCellan trashed the Bible. Opie and Forrest G. will probably still make a pile of treasure from the flick. It cost 1oo million to film! Not as much as Paul is worth, but still a lot.

This should be a night to do something besides watching normal TV fare. I am thinking about pulling out a VHS of In the Mood or something else I have had the tape of for years but just kept on the shelf. So many old movies--so little time.

This seems to be a short blog, but I think this will be all for right now. Millions and millions of blogs and bloggers, besides my little blog of genius. The whole world is online.

Oh yes; some guy on my local newscast is infoing us that you can get better gas milage if you drive with the car windows closed; open windows cause a wind drag that burns extra gas. Will have to try doing that. And now the local weatherman is saying that it will be in 80s next week.

Di di mau!

Monday Night and Whatever

Dud title for this blog entry, but that is my personal attitude tonight. Have the blaws, which segues into whining and opoormeism, which wastes precious minutes of the span of my life, but at this second that is what I have within my mental system. So, let us go onward to get rid of it and gain some positive Dale Carnegie attitude toward earthly life and the reality of the Universe.

This time in May should be warm and summery, but it has been raining all weekend and is windy at 9 p.m and is about 50 degrees instead of the 85 degrees I want. We are at least not going through the rain and flooding they are having in Massachusetts, but we had that kind of stuff in '93. And Bill Clinton came to Des Moines and felt our pain, and shelled out a lot of disaster relief money.

In the lastest issue of Campaigns and Elections magazine a lady who worked for Hillary said that one thing the masses do not know about the Clintons is how down to earth and humble they both are, and how kind Hillary is to the people on her staff. Words cannot express my feelings about reading this.

I went through my profile a while ago to see if anyone on earth has some of my interests. It is amazing how many people list Joe Dirt as one of their favorite movies, and how many people listed sleeping as one of their favorite activities. I should not be snippy about such things; I spent a lot of this weekend sleeping like a puppy. Made a bed, turned around three times, and went to sleep. I was tired and it was rainy for 3 days. So, missed a lot of TV (no loss), and took some care of my health by being passed out.

Am not going to rehash online my view of W's immigration speech; I will read some editorials and listen to the heads on Fox to get my official personal opinion. Saw on Drudge that CNN f--ed up by showing 16 seconds of W rehearsing his speech before getting on the air.

This is going to be all for right now. I need to do some housework before crashing into my bed. You all take care. Di di mau!

Moan and Groan on a Windy Friday

Not a climatically cheerful week this past week. Rain and drizzle and cold temps for midMay, and this afternoon it is very windy. Sometime true summer will get here. If Gore thinks that the planet is getting warmer he should be in Iowa right now.

Have not sent a blog into cyberspace for several days. What is on the news you have probably heard somewhere else besides here. According to the WashPost and Drudge there is a thing boiling about the one juror in the Mousaoui trial who held out 1-11 for not calling for the death penalty for M, and the juror will not be allowed to reveal why he almost hung the jury. I have visions of CNN trying to find the lone juror to get him on with L. King (an awful thought).

The big news in Iowa is that the 90-year-old Maytag plant in Newton is going to be closed by Whirlpool in July, tossing out 1,800 workers. It is a magagment vs. union blame game right now. I thing the company just had way too many people hired, to make too many washing machines the market could not get sold. OK, that is My current view of the situation.

Discovered while browsing the web last night that on May 2, one of my heroes, Louis Rukeyser had died. I watch Wall Street Week regularly for years and years, and got to think of Louis and Mary Ferrel and Marty and Lazlo and all of Lou's panelists as Friday night friends, even if I did not always understand what they were talking about. Now I have Cavuto and his gang to give me money news, and they are good, but do a lot more yelling than Lou and company. We will miss Mr. Rukeyser.

Read in a business magazine the other day that every second of the day someone new creates their own blog. Maybe that is why no one reads mine; We all have our own blogs.

So much news and so little time to absorb it all. I should feel shame in not following everything in the world that becomes a public issue, but I have fallen into that habit. There is a lot going on in Iraq I am not following the deepest details of (split infinitive), but I am contending that the news coming from the mideast is not much better than the news coverage from Vietnam 40 years ago, and they did not have all the technology to relay stuff instantly like we have now. And knowledge of what is going on in China (with the new cold war with them we are into) is pitiful. And what Putin is doing and life in current Russia is not covered at all by the MSM. Gripe, gripe, gripe.

I am way up on my tall horse, so I am going to go away for a while, till we blog again, so you take care, and I will be happier hopefully next time. Di di mau!

Blog while I am Cranky

Sitting up at 1 thirty in the morning after I took a long Friday night nap. I have not done a Friday night party after w0rk for a long time, after my party gang broke up and we all went our own ways, and with gas still high I am hogging my money these days. Des Moines got rid of many of its strip joints years ago and the drunk driver laws started to get enforced. And a lot of Baptists moved into the strip club area north of town and forced out most of the clubs, to have a clean climate for their kids. All that was probably needed, but it made the town a somewhat prissy place. About 30 years ago Des Moines was an uninhibited place, with massage parlors and grown-up bookstores and headshops all over the place. But the hippies got older and became yuppies, and we have a deluge of condos and coffee shops and boutiques, and wine and cheese emporiums. and someone is always trying to regulate something--for the safety of Our Children. The free spirits became regulators.

The CIA chief resigned today, supposedly because he could not get the outfit under control, and functioning effectively. We will probably find out what W and Goss said to one another in the Oval eventually.

Interesting column today in our local paper, copied from the Wash Post, by very liberal Richard Cohen, in which he takes the ax to the comics at the Press Club dinner who were up trashing W while W was sitting there taking it. Cohen actually said some nice things about W, and the Des Moines Register, which has gone way off the left edge, printed the column.

This will be all for right now. Not much of a blogging, because I am somewhat grouchy at this time. Will be happier sooner or later. Di di mau!

Wednesday Blog and Keep Your Chin Up

Mousaoui got sentenced to life in prison just a little while ago, and I am watching Cavuto on Fox relate and discuss the matter. The local newspaper the Des Moines Register ran an editorial today holding that we should keep talking to Iran about its nuke plans and not threaten them. Sounds good, but the same thing was said about how to deal with the German leader in the mid 1930s. But Dean Rusk was always using Munich as to why we should fight the North Vietnamese in the 1960s. Past events really do not go away. That is not really a brilliant new discovery I have made.

The jury's decision on Moussaoui seems to be very convoluted and controversial as to what they thought he was actually guilty of. This and the immigrant strike Monday will be talk fodder for quite a while. It is only Wed. and we have four more days in this week for something else to happen Big. At least several dozen Iraqis have been killed today in bombings and executions. As usual it all gets related in short news blips, and then the news goes on to something else.

Moussaoui will supposedly get life in total solitary confinement. Hopefully CNN or Norville will not try to send a camera crew to the prison to get an exclusive interview with M., like the networks used to do with Manson over the years. Sirhan has pretty much been kept off TV over the years, and I do not know if he is in solitary or what his prison life is like.

I found a copy yesterday at a thrift store of Dennis Mack Smith's biography of Mussolini, about whose life I know very little. Mack Smith does the bio around Musso as an individual and does not give the reader much info about Italy or European history. It is all Benito all the time, who Mack Smith sees as an Actor and not much of a thinker. And when the acting act ran down Benito crashed. Like the movie about Danton, with Depardieu. Interesting book I am planning to finish to give myself a little education. I am really not very smart or educated.

The soap opera Passions has put a story about a mermaid into the plot. Tabitha is behind the whole thing. The mermaid is a blond knockout in her gold bikini. Too bad the story is just a ripoff of Splash, but it is bound to shoot the ratings for Passion way way up. Now, if they could just get rid of Theresa, finally. And bring back cracked Connie.

Tiger Woods' father died today. Yesterday was the 60th birthday for Leslie Gore. No news on whether she cried at her birthday party.

So much has happened in the news today I need to stop and absorb it. So, fans, this is going to be all for right now. Di di mau!

Reaching for the inner meaning of Monday night

Tomorrow it is supposed to reach 80 degrees in central Iowa, which should be strange, because it has been cold and dreary and rainy all the past week and today. I promised my Ma I would not rant and rave about the immigrants, because I might say the wrong thing to someone, so I am going to keep my mouth shut about what I really thing, which is probably not the purpose of having a blog, but it may be necessary. How bout all them clauses and commas all in one sentence.
Finally watched The Ice Harvest yesterday. Pretty much of a thowaway movie, but I got hooked on watching it all the through to see how it ended. J Cusack and Billy Bob Thornton play two businessmen in Witchita who steal 2 million bucks on Christmas Eve. Snow and ice play a big part in the movie and most of the story takes place at night. Lots of suspense, but there are enough holes in the plot to drive a truck through. The lady lead in the movie is got up like Veronica Lake or Bacall. Cusack tries frantically to play the 40 year old guy he really is, but he still looks like Lloyd Dobler older and fatter. Cusack was better in Money for Nothing, which is also about a guy who steals a million bucks. Excessive violence and cussin' in this flick keep it unpleasant to want to see more than once.

The big thing in Des Moines today, beside the Latino strike, was the arrival in town of about 18,000 people to attend an all-day motivational seminar with Steve Forbes, George Foreman, Susie Orman, and Rudy Giulliani, and Zig Zieglar. Traffic was a horror all morning and afternoon rush hour times as everyone tried to get in and out of town on the local freeway, which is all torn up for rebuilding anyway.

You know, friends and fans, I am going to roll up this blog entry, because I am getting drowsy, and I am going to go to bed early, as soon as the Charlie Sheen show is over. You take care for now, and sometime I will create the Ultimate blog entry, which will be the Beethoven's Ninth of blogs. It will be achieved someday some time, so just wait. Di di Mau!

Spring, then Winter, then Spring again

It was a wonderful warm shorts and sandals spring until yesterday, when we fell back into the 30s and got a kind of a sleet rain afternoon, and today it is getting warm again. When it gets really cold in Iowa in April people start remembering a bad sudden blizzard we got hit with in 1973, which buried the state in about 2 feet of snow the day after everyone had to get their studded snow tires taken off. So, no one could drive and we were buried for about 3 days and then the sun came out and all the snow was gone in a few days.

I found a tape the other day of the 1972 western The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid, with Cliff Robertson and Robt. Duvall (as Frank and Jessie James.) I had seen a chopped up version of it years ago on late night TV, and had never seen the whole movie. Good movie, but somewhat from the hippie era in its outlook and visuals. Pretty much the same story as The Long Riders which came out a few years later. I should rent that one and watch it again. Not much else going on in reading and movie watching so far this spring. I have a rented DVD of The Ice Harvest with John Cusack I should view tonight or tomorrow. I hope Cusack can shed some of his Lloyd Dobler mannerisms and quirks he had made a career out of over the years.

Watched a segment the other night of a press conference held by Amadinejad gloating about how no one will ever push Iran around. The guy is a serious and dangerous character, but he was in front of a huge backdrop of downtown Tehran, that looked a lot like Letterman's set at the Sullivan Theatre. Hard not to teehee while watching the guy. Probably people had the same feelings watching newsreels of the Kaiser, Hitler and Mussolini.

Fox News had a segment a while ago about the families of the people on Flight 93 watching an advance screening of the movie. I don't think I can watch the movie when it is released. Everything that happened on 9-11 is still too raw to relive. I had the same situation for years when it came to watching films of JFK's funeral. I could not watch the stuff.

(This part is being written later:) One good show on the tube tonight. My Name is Earl was all about him trying to return a stolen police badge to the cop he stole it from. Silly show but funny. I tried to get through Survivor, The O.C., and Supernatural, but could not do it.

Cavuto had some economic honchos on talking about the gas crisis, and they contended that we all will just have to drive less. If you live in DC or NYC you could travel by cab, but the rest of us live in a country 3 thousand miles wide. It might be hard to just sit home and not move around the big spaces in the US.

This is going to be all for right now. More next time. Di di mau!

A Blog of a Sort To Present to the the World

It would have been interesting if Alexander Pope had had his own blog in 1730, in which he could rave about the people he was mad at, and he could have practiced his ryming couplets online, and he might have let us know what the trouble between him and Mary Wortley Montague actually was. But he just wrote lots of letters to his friends, and trashed his enemies in the Dunciad, and never got into cyberspace. We miss you, Al.

This is a nice but windy afternoon, and a long-predicted storm is supposed to be on the way. After the sneak tornado that suddenly appeared in Iowa City last week everyone is a little gunshy about the weather around this part of the heartland.

The news of the afternoon seems to be the Chinese woman who got into the press section at the White House and yelled at W and Hu. I should turn on Fox to get a story on the story, but I feel like leaving the tube off this afternoon. Will probably catch all the news at 5 p.m. Drudge has an LATimes statement by Pelosi, deploring Chinese human rights crimes. Well, where has she been since 1949? I have a feeling that China is becoming Japan of the 1930s--they are building up for a conquest campaign. Do they want to take over the world, militarily, or just economically? Does Chinese Communism amount to anything any more, or is it just an oligarchy in power? We will see.

Thursday night is the night for The O.C., and Earl. Two bad shows I am hooked on. And Survivor is also on. According to the new and improved TV Guide a guy gets his face cut up with a machete. I have not been following this edition of Survivor very closely. I know Shane is the crazy one, but I have not been able to sink my mind into this series. Something mental I guess. I have lost interest in American Chopper, and tried to watch King of Cars, with Chop trying to become the used car king of Vegas, but I can't get interested in it either. Man, is this an enthusiastic blog this time around.

I assume gas prices will hit 3 a gallon around here fairly soon. I had hopes to do some driving around Iowa this summer to see the rural parts of the state and get away from Des Moines' concrete jungle for one summer, but maybe I need to hog as much money as I can, and paying 40+ bucks for a fillup could easily drain my bank account. Magazines and videos are going out of the budget, and books as well. Maybe some simplicity and lack of googaws would do my soul some good--but it will be painful.

This is going to be all for right now. I need to take an afternoon snooze, and I know my myriad fans and devotees will want me to rest for a few hours. So, Di di mau!

Easter Sunday Night Thoughts

Somewhat gloomy and humid day today, on Easter Sunday. Tornadoes came through the midwest last night, hitting Beatrice, Nebraska and Lenox, Iowa. It is supposed to rain in Iowa on Monday. I caught up on some sleep last night, and piddled around much of today. Gas prices keep going up and up and will probably get to 3 bucks a gallon soon. Drudge was ranting on his website and on the radio tonight about the CEO of Exxon getting a retirement package of 450 million, and gas prices going up on Easter Sunday. Nejad is still ranting about destroying Israel, and Matthews and his liberal crew tonight are holding that there is nothing we can do about Iran. While searching through some blogs I found a mention of something Hitler had in '37 called the Hossbach Conference in which he gave his head generals his plans for conquering Europe and getting rid of everybody not aryan in order to achieve lebensraum. The idea from the blogs seems to be that if some leader says he is going to smash his enemies you should take him seriously. I read some stuff in McClure's old book on Abe Lincoln on Lincoln and how he dealt with Stanton, who had the whole Union Army officer crew hating him. Some similarity to Rumsfeld and the generals who want to get rid of him.

This is the birthdays of Sylvia Plathe (who would have been 74) and Nikita Krushchev(who would have been 112.) There are still some people in San Francisco, who were got together for a party, who were old enough to remember the 1906 earthquake (including one lady who is 108.)

A bad tornado last Thursday night came through Iowa City and did a job on the University of Iowa area, smashing a big church and a lot of student housing, as well as a lot of businesses around campus town.

I have been spending Easter week reading the gospels, the book of Acts, and Paul's letters to Timothy and Titus. Acts is much more interesting than I thought it would be, and 1st Timothy has some interesting stuff Paul wrote on Money. I have been using the Jerusalem Bible translation, which I have to read with my fingers crossed, but the translation does make Paul jump off the page and become a real human being, more than the King James version does.

This is going to be all for right now. It is time for bed. So, Di di mau.

Bloggin is a cummin in; lude sing cuku

I know that all 20 million bloggers on spaceship earth have been waiting for my next blog entry--and here it is. I started one a few days ago, but never got it finished, so the date on this one may be wrong. It is 11:45 p.m on 12 April right now. I am currently overwhelmed by the current events of the world, and am finally getting over that flu I had for a week or more at the end of March, but spring is finally here, and it may get up to 80 by the end 0f this week, so a certain amount of happiness is due. Iraq and Iran and the Duke U. lacrosse team rape case, and the Mexican immigrant demonstrations are the issues of the week.

There is a mess going on in Iowa right now, involving a number of people who were in charge of a state jobs training agency, who were discovered to have been making very large salaries it did not seem seemly for them to have been making. And this has opened up a lot of Iowa social class and political grudges involving a number of local political figures someone or other has had grudges against for years. The lady at the center of the scandal is a high school dropout with a GED, and several local blue collar and Italian-American politicians are getting slimed, and a local black activist is in on the situation, and it is score-settling time in Iowa, especially since at least one guy at the center of the situation has had people mad at him since some stuff he pulled during the flood of '93. Des Moines has a somewhat irritating social class system, which ever so often comes to the surface. It is now.

In 1749 Lord Chesterfield wrote to his son, telling him to keep himself clean and to dress properly, or he would be a fop at 20, slovenly at 40, and stink at 50. And keep your hair powdered when you go out in public.

I am going to let my fans and readers go to bed now, even though this has been a fairly short blog entry, and it has been several days since I have typed anything. Some time I may pour out all my political and social opinions, and let Everybody have it, but it may turn out that I have opinions and no hard cold facts to suport them, and just have a lot of rants. So, you all take care. Di di mau!

As the General Blog Turns

Well, a couple hours ago it was 1:02:o3 on 4-o5-06. In a couple of months there will a time and date of 6:06:06 on 6-06-06.

My health has been improving all day and I must be finally getting over this week-long flu bout which has just about decommissioned me. I know all my fans really want to know this.

Have been looking into opera websites and chatsites and the big news in operaland is the sudden arrival on the scene of Erika Sunnegardh, a blond lady who was put into a Met broadcast Saturday of Fidelio, Beethoven's only opera, and a very demanding vocal part. No one seems to have known anything about Ms. S., and she wowed the opera house audience and got wild applause and a big write-up in the NY Times, and overseas. The Met publicity machine seems to have pulled out all the stops to get the lady famous. The radio broadcast is generating great controversy as to whether the lady can really sing or not, and who she really is. The chatrooms are burning up with debate about what went on April 1.

A big flap brewing in Iowa concerning some people at the top of a state employment agency and the somewhat large salaries they have been receiving. Much less salary than several college coaches are getting, but it has struck a nerve among various state citizens. Maybe a storm in a tea pot, but a kind of a scandal. We are shocked--shocked!

You know, I am going to bed, and will continue all of this sometime tomorrow. I hope you understand. I know you will. So, Di di mau!

After the Storms Comes the Spring

OK, the title of this opus comes from the last section of Beethoven's sixth symphony. A big musical storm section, and then the sun is supposed to come out and there is a lilting folk tune that builds into one of Bs hymns of joy, and all is lovely in the world. I think B was trying to convey a When Napoleon is Gone All Will be Peace message. Anyway it is nice in the midwest tonight after a stormy weekend all over the US.

This has been the third bad-sick in bed session I have had in life since the end of '98 when I had a bad flu bout. Then in '02 I had the diabetic heart attack, and this weekend when I did another flu spell that came on Wed. night, and finally put me flat on my back, and I am still in the final stages of shaking it. So, my health is what is on my mind, even though I know Iran now has underwater missiles, and Florida whupped UCLA tonight and a stupid Indian girl won a lot of money on Howie's Deal...show. She irritated me because she looked too much like M. Lewinsky. And I know the immigration issue gets uglier as more people get to open their mouths about it.

This actually is going to be all in this blog for right now. My fingers are not working good at all, and Jimmy Kimmel is coming on in a little while, and when I am just as healthy as a peach I will be funny and will have a blog that all my countless fans will think is the happiest thing they have ever read in cybspace. So you all wait and I will be back. Di di mau!

Where Do You Hurt? Everwhere!

There is not much to report on dealing with the woes of the world. Not that human events have stopped--but I have spent 2.5 days in bed with a really wicked April Fools flu, and Fox and CBS and the other MSM have actually been shut off for much of that time, and I have been Sleeping. All day and all night, and an occassional trip to the peepee can, and then back to bed. My back hurts, my eyes are out of focus, my feet hurt, and this typing is a mess because I cannot control my fingers on the keyboard. Ain't this interesting to read? I do hope that tomorrow I will cast off what ever is making me a woeful thing, and will jump up happy and healthy. In fact my typing is getting so bad as I go along that I may just let this be my blog for the night. More tomorrow or when I get to feeling better. I had a bunch of stuff about today's Met opera broadcast, but I should check with La Cieca first. You all be good. Di di mau!

Don't Cry For Me, Blogentina

Ain't we just funny, with that really cute title at the top. That was inspired by a guy I found in the blogosfeer who said his favorite book was Finnegan's Wake, so I though a strange Jim Joyce-type phrase might be in order as an eye catcher. I looked into Finnegan's Wake one time and put it away. Somebody somewhere understands it, but I could not. Neither could Joyce's wife.

Finally we are getting some rain today, but as usual with the local weather I am complaining about it. Whatever the climate is I seem to get gripey about it; 2 cold, 2 windy, 2 cloudy, 2 icy, 2 dry, 2 hot (when it finally does get warm). Some people ain't happy with nuthin.

The big news story around here will probably be the college kid who spent 3 days living in a west-side of Des Moines Wal Mart (See Drudge for the story). I was in that Wal Saturday night and may have seen him, but there were so many people in the store crashing carts into each other and letting their kids run wild, that I just got some socks and a coffee pot and some body wash and got out of the place as soon as I could.. The story mentions that some birds flew into the produce area and were eating grapes out of a box. That should shoot the Walton family into space if they read Drudge or the Des Moines Register.

Moussaoui got up in court today and announced that he and Reid the shoe bomber were planning to crash a plane into the White House. The discussion on afternoon Fox News is about Mousaoui is a lier and or just crazy, and you can't believe a word he says.

Not fun being an Iraqi right now. Forty people killed in one car bombing, and a pile of headless bodies found in one room around Sadr City. And more GIs dead. Saturday night all the talk shows on cable took up most of prime time with new news about Natalie and whether Sloot killed her or she died from a drug overdose.

No one on cable has yet noted that the preacher murder took place in Selmer, Tennessee--which is where Buford Pusser kept law and order with his club years ago. Way back in the 1920s there was a once-famous case in Connecticut where a preacher and his girl-friend were found murdered, and the wife was put on trial. The once-famous "pig woman trial." The wife was found innocent, and no one still knows who did the murders.

NewsMax has the transcript of a Sunday night radio brawl on WABC between Alec Baldwin and Sean Hannity. Sean called the station and accused AB of supporting terrorists, and AB, before he walked off the show, was calling SH of being a former "construction worker hack..and Long Island house builder." So much for Alec Baldwin's view of blue collar workers. The yelling also got into Baldwin's weight and Kim Bassinger.

A golden day yesterday for C-Span 1 and 2 devotees. A panel on Vietnam with Dan Rather and others telling stories about how the news back then was reported. Then Chief Justice Roberts was on giving an interesting speech. Then David Horowitz taking on a bunch of college lefties, and then Wesley Clarke talking about Patton, and Tony Blair having a wild Question Time.

Fox is covering a situation in LA involving a bunch of ant-immigration bill school kids blocking a downtown freeway in the afternoon rush hour.

More later. You all take care for now. Di di mau!

A Blog of Ramblingness

This blog may be dated for Fri. 3-24, but I did not get it finished, and wiped away what I had in my draft, and so this is actually being typed on Saturday night.

A Saturday of doing errands around the DM metroplex and buying and charging, and listening to some of the Met opera of Luisa Miller (La Cieca and his band of opera queens did not like the cast). Then took a nap and piddled around on Sat. night, and read and listened to talk shows on the tube and radio.

Buck Owens passed away. He is now with most of the Hee Haw gang--Grandpa Jones, Minnie Pearle, Archie Campbell, Lulu, and Junior Samples.

A Drudge segment the other day was about a honcho of Castro who is now in exile in Miami, and is a local TV star, giving out amazing stories about the Brothers C. Fidel burns his used underwear in case someone tries to smear poison in his drawers, and Fidel and Raul have a large stash of cash squirrelled away.

The Iraq war goes on, and the newest news topic is that the Russians gave Saddam our invasion plans before we went in. And Iran is supposedly in a hurry to get its nuke made and ready. There was a report a while back that they will have the thing ready on April 8.

Some doofus shot up a house full of people partying in Seattle--offing seven people, and then himself.

I have some strong opinions about the anti-immigration reform protests taking place around the US, but I am trying to be tolerant. And that is all I am going to say in this blog being sent into cyberspace.

For the historical record; gas prices in Des Moines are now up to $2.45, and canned soup and frozen entree prices are going up and up.

I am going to terminate this blog entry now, and take a nap. Hopefully I will have a better one on Sunday night, with much more depth and more infobits about the state of the earthly body politik. I need to read some more news websites, and actually read a real newspaper. So, fans and devotees, Di di mau!

Night After the Non-Blizzard

The horrible blizzard we were supposed to get got here last night and was an inch of wet slushy snow and hard winds, but it all stopped about ten a.m this morning and the sun came forth and the slush melted on the streets and the snow evaportated and that was our first day of spring blizzard, at least in the center of the midwest.

Ran around this afternoon and this evening and did not catch a lot of the news, exept that W and Helen Thomas had a heated discussion at his press conference. The big news that the basketball coach from Northern Iowa is going to take over at Iowa State took up more local news time than the blizzard.

I rented a dvd of March of the Penguins this afternoon and hope to slide it into the slot after I get done watching Fellini Satyricon, which is a really weird movie--supposed to be a satire on ancient Rome and the decadence of the modern world in the 1960s, I think. I got 45 minutes of it watched in one sitting, and wonder how anyone in '69 sat through 2 hours of it at one stretch. The last really strange art movie I got through was The Tin Drum several years ago. Maybe I am not as attuned to European art movies as I thought I would be. I did like Danton, one of the great political movies. A French-Polish colaboration, the movie is about the French Rev. leader Danton, who I guess would rather make a speech than run the Revolution. He ends up on the guillotine in a harrowing depiction of what it was like to get your head chopped off. A movie which should be seen by all gabby politicians. And Depardieu does a great job as Danton.

Went to my vets club meeting tonight, and a guy in our group who is in the Nat Guard and is in his late 50s is due to be sent to Iraq for 18 months in June.

That is about all for tonight. Lots of stuff going on on earth, but Drudge does better at selecting important news than I can summarize in a blog. I should get a little sleep, so I need to make my nest and turn around three times before I nestle down in my nest--just like a doggie does. You all take care. Maybe a deeper blog next time I face the keyboard. Di di mau!

A Sunday Night in March in the 21st Century

Bits and pieces about a disorganized weekend. Broke a piece of a tooth, and the dentist is not in till Tuesday. I fasted yesterday and a lot of today to protect Tommy Tooth (I needed to not eat to use up some lard on my handles.) Last night watched the Iowa basketball championships on tv; very actually exciting basketball; the kids played amazing ball. This morning I watched Chris Wallace and his gang on Fox, and it looked like Britt Hume and Juan Williams and Bill Crystal were going to get up and slug one another before the show was over; very intense argument over the war.

After the talking heads were done I slid in a vhs I rented of Woody Allen's Bullets Over Broadway. Really bad movie, but one you keep watching to see what is going to happen next. Supposed to be a satire I guess on the Theatre in the 1920s, or a satire on sacrificing Art for Money, or a satire on Woody's problems in getting movies made, or some other message Woody wants to send. Real mess of a plot, and John Cusack is totally lost at sea in this one. Bullets was nominated for a bunch of Oscars, but I do not think I will watch it again for quite a while. So, this afternoon I rented Fellini Satyricon and Spanking the Monkey. Will see what I think of these two opuses (or opii). Tried to find a tape of a quirky movie called Manny and Lo, but a couple of video stores I frequent did not have it. I was going to spend the winter catching up on viewing a lot of movies I had not seen, but now it is coming spring, and I am just getting back into the movie groove, right at the time when soon being outside is what needs to be done. And, another session of watching the news will be necessary, when the paving-over of Iran starts happening. Cheerful, ain't this? And I seem to be using the dative case a lot.

I usually like Cusack as an screen actor, even if he sometimes seems to get by on his quirky mannerisms, but in Bullets he or Woody seems hopeless trying to convey the role of an idealistic playwright getting his play put on. (This is not good prose, but it is now 1 a.m and I am groggy.)

Some time on Monday we are suposed to get a late March snowstorm, but it has not arrived yet.

Found some interesting websites recently: www.mysteriouspeople has a story about Candy Jones, a famous 1950s supermodel with a split personality who was supposedly drugged by the CIA into being a spy. And www.prairieghosts has stuff on D. D. Home, a 19th century medium who supposdly could fly through the air. And the same site has a section on a famous medium named Margery who held seances in the nude and has a feud with Houdini, who tried to prove she was a phony.

After all this I am going to repair to my divan and try to sleep for a while. I hope this blog has been at least minimally interesting to my countless fans and devotees. Di di mau!

A Friday Night in March in the 21st Century

Six weeks have passed since Phil and General Lee came out and saw their shadows or didn't, so winter should be over, but it is still cold, and we badly need moisture to fall from the sky onto our very dry soil. Probably the rain will come in April. A choice between needed rain, and warm weather and shorts and sandals.

Marilyn Monroe would have been 80 years old on upcoming June 1 (born in 1926).

I found at a thrift store a used vhs tape of TV highlites of Ernie Kovacs shows. The guy was a pioneer genius at creating visual TV comedy. A shame that TV Guide regularly ignores him at a TV pioneer and networks like TVland never find the space to fit tapes of his old shows into their schedule. (Come on, TV--give us Percy Dovetonsils, and the Nairobi Trio!)

Big sports debacle in Iowa today. The Hawkeyes screwed up in March Madness and lost their lead in a game with Northwest State, and were humiliated, and the basketball coach and his whole staff at Iowa State were fired.

There may be a nasty scandal due to break at the Metropolitan Opera, dealing with the pedophilia of a famous conductor and a big Met payoff of the Law to keep the matter covered up, ongoing for a number of years. Anyway, this is a hot topic on a prominent opera-gossip website (La Cieca).

The upcoming hot story out of California may be Maria's grab for power behind Arnold's throne. She is already being compared to Evita Peron, (and a similar situation in Arkansas a couple of decades ago.)

After all of these bits, I have ignored Me, but there is not much to tell all my fans and devotees, because I have not done anything personal that is FoxNewsworthy since Monday. So, this will be all for right now till the next I blog. I need to get an oil change tomorrow--which may or may not be newsworthy, and the dirty underwear needs a washing. Take care, and we will return soon. Hand tough, Steve and Beve. Di di mau!

Going Gazhi

Hannity and Colmes and their guests tonight on Fox had a brawl about the Taliban guy attending Yale-why he is in the US anyway and whether he can be trusted not to do something insidious while he is here, and whether seeing American life might make him learn to love Americans and their values.

Some of the old writers from the British Raj era (Halliburton, Roy Andrews, Lowell Thomas) wrote about something colonial honchos had to fear from their Gunga Din-type "boys," called "going gazhi" (sic), a thing where your loyal native Boy might fall under the spell of a mullah and suddenly kill the Infidel at night or when the Brit was peeing facing Mecca or any other offensive thing to set Gunga off in a holy rage. You never could tell what might Gunga snap. A liberal Democrat dude on H&C's panel was convinced that Mr. Taliban would be so mellowed by his time in America and Yale that he would never do anything terrorist again. It did not work that way with Atta and his crew, or in liberal London, Madrid, and Amsterdam.

After a somewhat low-key winter March has turned nasty--a wave of tornadoes in the midwest and tonight a seven-inch blizzard in S. Dakota. Two twisters in a row hit Springfield Illinois yesterday and ripped up the city. No word yet on how Abe Lincoln's house fared. The U. of Kansas got torn up pretty bad.

This is going to be a short blog tonight. I wanted to write something about "going gazhi" and record the record-setting March tornado outbreak, and in a little while I should hit the Sack. I feel like I have all the mucus monsters in my head doing the conga, so I ought to try to get them out of me. They have been partying inside me all winter. No Letterman tonight and I have missed watching the roller derby women reality show. Is the series about the tattoo parlor in Vegas still on the air? Miami Inked is still on, I know. OK, Di di mau!