Even More Whining About the Weather et al

Here is some more whining about the dreary winter and the cold air and the icy slush on the streets and the crows that come into town every night and scream in the trees and shit all over everything. We have had worse winters, but like the one last season this one has gotten dreary and irritating after three months, and we have two more months to go before April gets here, and in place of nice spring we may have a long stretch of rain before wonderful warm summer, which may arrive in August. Whine, whine, whine! Everyone in my social universe has had colds and is as grouchy as I am. We are all poor souls. The quest for the presidency is going on and on. Right now everything is concerning hrh and bama yelling at each other about which one is more of a crook; he has dealings with a Chicago slum lord and she is on the board of Walmart and he is hooked up with a black militant preacher in Chi, and she has Bill hanging around and yelling at reporters. Some of the longtime feminists are mad at bama for trying to stall her from being a shoein as president. And Fred Thompson dropped out of the race. W and congress are working on a plan to rebate about 600 bucks to taxpayers to fire up the economy. In the 70s Ford gave us all a rebate. If I remember--the deal was to spend the rebate on stereos and housewares. Interesting that just a few years later stereos went away when cds came in. The political news recently has pushed Iraq and world news to the side. McCain is suddenly on a roll, and from reading some websites with comments sections Ron Paul has a small but vocal core of devotees. Movie actor Heath Ledger drugged himself to death a few days ago. I had heard of him but never paid any attention to his existence, but he seems to had had a lot of fans. In personal news I am reading a Kevin Phillips book on President McKinley, and Rousseau's Confessions, and am going to watch a dvd of Little Miss Sunshine sometime this weekend. It is now 2 a.m. and I am going to conclude this blog entry. All of you take care, and I may be back tomorrow night or Sunday for another session. It is time to go to some late in the darkness website searching. Stay warm, fans. Di di mau!

Is Spring Somewhere?

It was cold today and windy and the concrete has been slick, and I should examine world affairs that have occured since yesterday. All I have checked up on is that the P***ckers whipped the Seahawks by 20+points. More info will be coming forth at 10 p.m. On this dreary Saturday night I needed a movie tape to slip into the slot, and got out an old vhs of Gidget! Not a modern flick, but a good one for a night like this, bringing back memories of the local picture show 50 years ago. I think my family actually went to see Gidget one night c. 1960, and we enjoyed it. Sandra Dee looked good way back then, and she could act. A shame that she destroyed her life with firewater. Her father and mother were portrayed as goofs, and the music on the soundtrack was more '40s than rocknroll '50s, but it is an enjoyable flick on a dark winter night. I should watch a bunch more of "old" movies. When stumped with politics take a break and watch some movies. On Fox News this afternoon the reporters had a segment about a guy named Olmstead, who got killed in Iraq, but left a very powerful final blog entry to be posted after his death. I thought the commentator was going to cry as he read the post on air. Incidentally the 40th anniversary of the Tet Offensive will be at the end of this month, and this week is the 39th anniversary of my induction into the US Army at Ft. Lewis, an unpleasant period of life I survived with my body intact, but with some agent orange poison in me I did not find out about for many years. Enough of that for now. I lost two friends in 2007--one was fired from work, and one died of some kind of saliva gland cancer.
This is going to be all for right now. Di di mau!

Please, Spring, Come to Us Again

Cold and icy and windy tonight, after we got an afternoon slush storm yesterday and the slush froze and the streets slicked up. We are in the period of winter when the city is overwhelmed with crows who screech all night in the trees and on the roofs and shit all over the streets. After HRC came in second in the Iowa caucuses(they are being considered now as "primaries" by pundits) she went to NH and has been badmouthing Iowa and Iowans, and Bill and company seem to be playing the race card against Barak O. The Republican candidates were on Fox last night in a debate, which did get into issues about national security, but I was sleepy and did not soak in all the nuances of what they meant bey what they were saying. Need to get some newspapers and read what someone else said they said. McCain was the most impressive, but I need more studying of what I heard while half-dozing.
I found a vhs of North By Nortwest at a thriftstore and watched it this afternoon. It is supposed to be one of Alfred H's masterpieces, but I was a little disappointed in it. I have never seen the flick before. Cary Grant and James Mason were in top form and Eva Marie was good, but had no real sex appeal, and the big scenes at the end of everybody climbing around on Mt. Rushmore were a little phoney. But I did watch closely to see if just maybe Eva would fall off the cliff. The movie was just a little too clever for its own good. Maybe I should watch it again tomorrow night to see if it improves with a second viewing. Possibly I just do not dig Hitchcock as much as some cinema fans do. I do need to get back into watching movie tapes to catch up on some classics I have not seen in years or have not seen at all. Actually I suppose I do not Need to see a lot of movies, and should spent more free time reading current news off the net, and even do some book reading I have let slide for several years. I did find a book on sale of some essays by A. J. Liebling, who I had never read before. Very good writer,and some of his World War Two columns are very interesting, but he did spend too much time writing about French food, in my opinion. And he apparently ballooned up to 400 lbs, and then died. Maybe I just do not worship New Yorker Mag. writings. Maybe I will some time change my mind about everything I have opined on this evening. It has happened before.
I am going to end this blog entry now. Maybe tomorrow night I will have more interesting stuff going through my mind and will not be so critical of so much stuff. All you fans and devotees keep waiting and some time I will have a blog essay that will just blow us all away. Di di mau!

Blog Post-Caucuses

OK, the Tuesday night things are over, and Obama and Huckabee got more votes than the other candidates for President, and Biden and Dodd dropped out of the race, and Rudy didn't even show up in Iowa that day, and when the caucii were over the candidates and the media crews all headed to New Hampshire, and Iowa returned to normalcy and the cold spell we have been having. The caucii were chaotic, due to the fact that so many people showed up for their local meetings that many of the school rooms being used did not have room for all the people who showed up. In Des Moines there was so much traffic and closed streets in our downtown that it was difficult to get to the meeting hall and there was no parking. I should give the world my thoughts on why HRC came in second among the Democrats in an upcoming blog entry.
This is a quiet Saturday night. Here I am in my room catching up on some video watching. I just got done watching Darling, with Julie Christie. Interesting 40+ year-old black and white British movie. About half way through the thing it begins to hook the viewer on what will eventually happen to Christie's coniving character as she moves from man to man in her quest for stardom. A movie that needs to be seen more than once to catch the nuances of what is going on.
And now I am watching Lou Costello and Dorothy Provine in The 30-Foot Bride of Candy Rock. I saw this one at the hometown picture show in 1960, but did not remember much about what was in it till I found a tape of the thing at a local thrift store, and now after 48 years I am watching it again. It is kinda funny. Costello may have been dying when he made the movie, but he managed to do a movie without Abbott with him. Provine was also good. And Gayle Gordon steals the show.
Actually Costello was playing the kind of schnookie character Don Knotts would be playing in a few years.
This has been a bad weekend in the world weatherwise. Heavy rainstorm in Australia after their worst drought in history. Brush fires in Oklahoma after bad ice storms last month. A bad blizzard in north California and Nevada. And a dam broke in Nevada after supposedly a gopher dug holes in the dam. And heavy rains around Malibu have soaked the burned out area with mud slides.
OK, my own private view of what happened to Hillary in Iowa is that she spent so much time talking about the 35 years of experience she has to be president material that she began sounding like Dole, Humphrey, Clay, and Webster and other candidates who thought their long time in politics would make them statesmen but ended up just being old guys who had been clawing for power for too long, in the view of voters. HRC needs to read up on American history some more. Now that is my own opinion, and you are free to have yours.
This is going to be all for right now. I just put a video of Dumbo into the vcr for late night viewing. Take care, fans and devotees, and I will blog again. Di di mau!

Hopefully Happy New Year

It is very ice cold and windy in the midwest on the first day of 2008. Last week on Christmas day it was a day of icy snow all over the center of the US. This is winter and next month the groundhog will come out and then spring will be in the near offing. The sooner the better. The worst thing about the winter so far has been the expensive power outages around the heartland, and the number of people killed in car wrecks on icy roads.
This may a lengthy blog entry if I can stay with a rehash of the major events of 07 I would like to write. So, far 3,900 US troops have been killed in Iraq. La Bhutto was murdered in Pakistan last week. Right now there is tribal violence in Kenya, and an American diplomat was killed by someone in Khartoum. American Intelligence concluded that Iran stopped work on nuke weapons in '03, which led to lots of yelling that Bush Had Lied about the dangers from Iran. A little over a year ago in Iraq Saddam met his noose, which was barely mentioned by the News Media last week. In the spring a crazy Korean student at Virginia Tech killed 30+ students in a classroom massacre, and a crazy kid killed 8 people in a shopping mall in Omaha. (And a guy shot several people last summer at a mall in Kansas City.) And fires in LA destroyed hoards of very expensive houses in the Malibu area around Halloween. And great numbers of people was killed by the periodic typhoons that hit Bangladesh. This upcoming January 20 will mark the last year of W's presidency. And 13 people were killed in a bridge collapse in Minneapolis. Hugo Chavez called an election in Venezuela to give him unlimited power, but lost the referendum, but as of now is still president. Tony Blair turned his PMship over to Gordon Brown and last week became a Catholic. Next year in Feb we all have to go to HD TV. Seems like a secret plot to get everyone in the US to go onto cable, but it is supposed to be good for us.
I may have more stuff to blog about on politics after the caucuses Thurdsday night. I wish the candidates would all leave the state and not come back. I realize that one candidate I loath will get elected Prez in November and we will have to live with whoever he or She is, because that is how our system operates, but I do not care for any of them, but every four years I say that.
MSN listed 169 famous people who died in 07. I will have more to write about this next time when I reread the list, but only the WSJ the other day mentioned that one of the three surviving gentlemen who served in the AEF in WWI died a week or so ago.
This year is going the be the 40th anniversary of everything that happened in 1968--a year that had absolutely nothing good happen in it. From the Tet Offensive to Harper Valley PTA being a huge music hit. I wish the media would rehash 68 on a daily or weekly basis, so everyone could be reminded of all that happened that year, for historical reference.
I hope 08 is a lowkey year--it probably will not be, but it would be nice if it were. 07 was an ugly year, but my Mama is still in good health, and my family is getting along as well as can be hoped. The next 2 years are going to be eventful, because my place of work is going to be shutting down by the middle of 10. Either find another job or prepare for retirement. I need to get my life and my finances in order, because I have let my life get somewhat disorganized in the last few years after the diabetes attack. Be a man and act like one through the upcoming events in employment. I have closed the door on some consuming grudges that I have been holding about some stuff that happened in the late 1960s. Enough of that. This is going to be all for right now. I hope I have more to write about in my upcoming blog entries. Time for bed and back to work early in the morning. Take care, dear fans. Di di mau.