Bad Memorial Day weekend

Iowa finally this spring got its tornadoes yesterday p.m. after seeing the things wreck the South for the last several weeks. Two towns in northern Iowa, west of Waterloo, were blown away and wrecked totally (Parkersburg and New Hampton) with what may have been an F5er. Then another one smashed Hugo, Minnesota, a suburb north of St. Paul. Then about 6 p.m. a fast moving wind blast did a tree wrecking and power line knock down on the south side of Des Moines. And Liz Trotta yesterday morning on Fox News made a dumb comment about how Obama and Osama should both be assasinated. I always have liked Liz as a talking head. She has been a pundit for years, I think going back to when there was network radio news, but she did a tongue slip of fatal proportions yesterday. And I am having car engine problems that appeared yesterday--so May 25 O8 was not a good day for many many people. I will not try to review what the gruesome threesome did on the campaign trail yesterday. With the car problems I did not get to any Memorial Day services, but kept my own vigils for some fallen friends. The last surviving WWI veteran, Jack Buckle, was interviewed on Fox and CNN today. He is about 103 and seems to be alert and in good health. This is going to be all for right now. The tornadoes of yesterday are the main news in this part of the country, and I need to get the car looked at tomorrow. You all take care. Di di mau!

One Thursday Night in Human History

Obama was in town Tuesday evening, but I had to be out of town, and missed him. I have seen Reagan, Dukakis, Teddy Kennedy, Mondale, Gene McCarthy, Garth Brooks, and the immortal George Strait, and Morgana over the decades when they were in Des Moines, so I have seen a few Big people. And I must not forget seeing Herb Stemple, when he was here when the movie Quiz Show came out. What has happened today? My vacuum cleaner is defunct, I broke my toilet bowl lid, I dropped a coffee cup I picked up at a thrift store, and I recently spilled coffee all over my desk I am sitting at. And there were tornadoes in Colorado and Wyoming. And more fires in California. And gas prices went up overnight in Iowa to over 4 smackers a gal. I have a bunch of oil and energy websites bookmarked, and I need to start looking at them, and I have on youtube discovered a huge pile of videos of pop singers from the '30s from Europe: Eva Busch, Missinguett, Michislav Fogg, and a lot of others. Very interesting good quality music from an otherwise awful era. But you know what was going to happen in and after '39. And more and more opera singer videos are getting put on the Tube. Despite what intellectuals think of Youtube, I keep finding more and more stuff on it that I would never have heard or seen otherwise. And I have to mention the amazing Polish singer Violetta Vilas, who in the Iron Crtain 60s dressed like Charo, but was a very good pop singer. Vi V is now one of my secret pleasures, along with the great Lebanese singer Wadi Al Safi. One of my secrets is that I am not that interested in the new Indiana Jones movie. Like with James Bond and Star Wars I have just never gotten into Indi J.
This is going to be all for right now, after I have done all this opining. You all take care. Di di mau!

saturday Night Blog

Not a very interesting title for this blog entry, but I doubt that the billions of people on earth will go catatonic over it, or they might. This is the first day in 222 days in the midwest that the temperature has gotten into the high 80s. Nice warm summer weather, but for some reason it still feels like late March is still on us. Teddy Kennedy had "seizures" this morning and was rushed to the hospital. He has been the center of national news all day. I am just not a Kennedy family fan. At one time I thought I was a JFK fan, but I never warmed to Bobby. I know--Jack was the President during my high school years, so there is historical nostalgia of a sort about "Camelot", but I have developed a sourness about the era. And then Ted Sorenson comes on MSNBC with Russert this afternoon to wax nostalgic, and I think TS is an old smug flack anyway. I posted a message to a website somewhere once that the Camelot era was more of the Cleopatra era. Much of the JFK era was the time when that lousy Taylor-Burton was being filmed and there was an unbelievable amount of news coverage given to the whole matter. Like the JFK period, Cleo. was a flawed product. OK, have at me; but those are my views. I missed watching the Preakness this p.m, and did not get to see Big Brown win. Really wonderful horse. Obama is coming back to Des Moines Tuesday p.m. Last news about Teddy is that he is alert and did not have a stroke.
This is going to be all for right now. You all take care. Di di mau!

Yeehaw We Are Back Blogging

It does not seem like it has been January since the last entry, but it has been. I guess I got bogged down with the lousy winter we went through, some sickness, and getting ready for retirement--which was part of the first stage of closing down my work place. So, I got to retire instead of getting simply laid off. The FRB eliminated 19 peoples' jobs, and is supposed to dismiss the remaining crew by this time next spring. Maybe it was time to leave my Job, after 35 years, but it had become my life, so now I am trying to ease my way into the golden senior citizen years. I have managed to not go into old age depression and woe. There is a world to explore, and I hope to slowly find it. I have only been retired for 2 weeks, so I will get adjusted to it. Enough of that.
Hillary has been getting pounded in the primaries by "Bama, and the most interesting thing about this doopy election campaign I think is that she has become a dramatic lesson in riding high and then getting stabbed by her "friends" from the last couple of decades who have turned on her. There's a Shakespeare or Tolstoy essence to the human drama of this campaign, beyond the "scholarly" polisci angles. And the first pres campaign between a white woman and a mixed race man has all the ugliness that we thought was a thing of the past.
I suppose that you can look through the Drudge archives to get the historical rehash of what has happened in the world since January. The world's weather and plates are what is causing much of the human suffering right now. The typhoon in Burma and the monster earthquake in western Red China and the spate of tornadoes in the south and eastern USA are the big events that have fucked up thousands of peoples' lives. And the big rise in oil and gas prices in the USA are wiping out everybody's cash researves. I wanted to spend part of my postretirement summer travelling, even just around Iowa, but but with gas prices moving toward 4 bucks a gallon I may not be able to go too far. We will have to see what the summer brings forth.
Charleton Heston, Eddie Arnold, and Leyla Gencer have all passed away recently.
The sinter finally went away about a month ago, but the temp is still in the 70 degree range, and the chilly March-type winds will not go away in the heartland. Hopefully real summer will get here eventually. We need it for the crops and summer work.
It is now close to 2 a.m, so I will end this blog entry. Life's events kept me from blogging for too long, but I hope I can get this blog started again. Have found a bunch of videos on utube of 1930s European singers (Eva Busch, Missinguet, Nanka Ordonowa, Ruslanova, et al) I had never heard of, and I found some videos of Ina Rae Hutton and her all-girl band. I think they are interesting, whether loftier people do or do not. There goes the chip on my shoulder I get some times when social class grudges come up. Well, you all take care. Di di mau!