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!

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.

Nada or Just a Small Segment

Nothing exciting happened in my life today, so this will probably be a experiment in writing about Nothing. Perhaps I will end up doing a James Joyce mental streaming segment in which whatever is in my mind will emerge in print. We will see. I did finally watch The Big Bang Theory on CBS. Funny, but not a show that will be remembered in the History of Creative Television. The actors are working their nuts off bring their nerd characters to life, but it is a throw-away show. The big news in the heartland is that Oprah is coming to Des Moines on Dec. 8 to campaign for Obama. It will probably be the high point of the local political season. Maybe she will get a motorcade through downtown. The local Walmart today had a widescreen tube showing Shrek 3 in HD; Very bright sharp picture quality, but the local cable company will probably raise rates next winter when we have to go to HD. I could use the extra bucks monthly put into my nestegg instead of having super sharp picture. We will have to see what happens. I found a copy of Charles Peters' book on the 1940 campaign between FDR and Wilkie. Interesting account of a topic I knew very little about. An interesting angle of the history is that Wilkie was an alchoholic. That leads to some interesting speculation on what would have happened to the course of WW2 if he had beaten Roosevelt in '40, with a booze problem. I know--Churchill had the same problem as Wilkie. Last night I wrote some stuff about the goofy video I bought called Sonny Boy. I should mention that the bad people in the movie cut out Sonny's tongue. Now I wil reveal that a good doctor gave Sonny a monkey's tongue, and he was able to talk then. I did rent the other night a video of 7 Brides for 7 Brothers--which I have never seen, except in little clips of the dancing. I was very disappointed in 7... Yes, it had Howard Keel and Jane Powell--but the music was not really very good, the Michael Kidd dancing segments were not all that impressive, and the ending was not done very well. I just have never been as impressed with most of the MGM musicals I have watched over the years that film buffs think are great cinema art. My critical opinion! This is going to be all for right now. This is not going to be looked upon as one of the great bloggings of all time, but eventually I will create a total masterpiece. Till then, you take care. Di di mau!

Sunday Night Victory

The Bears pulled off a 3 point win over the Broncos in a Sudden death overtime game this evening. Great game that had me on the edge of the chair all the last half. Hester and Rex the Great did it. So, now it is time to calm down and wait for next week. Life does go on. Fires have broken out in the Malibu area again and are burning more houses. Drudge has a bit that the London Times is claiming that Hilary and the woman working as her assistant are lovers. Victory, tragedy, and trash are all the stuff in the news. And there is supposed to be an Israeli-Palistinian peace conference in Annapolis, with a lot of Mid East diplomats coming to the thing. The score of the Bears-Broncos game was 37-33. I found a tape at a thrift store of a goofy movie called Sonny Boy--about a kid who was raised by a trash couple to be a criminal (they cut out his tongue) but he is redeemed by the love of a girl. The main reason to watch this thing is to see David Carradine play a transvestite, whose death scene is actually very moving. Sonny Boy is actually listed by a number of bloggers as one of their favorite movies. I am typing this entry with no paragraph breaks. I did have a good Thanksgiving with my family Thursday, which was the day of the first snow in the heartland. Not a major snow, but at least five people in Iowa were killed in car wrecks on the slick roads. I am going to wind up this blogging, and let my fans and devotees get back to what you are doing. It will be time for bed in a little while. So, you all take care. Di di mau!

Thanksgiving

Here we are blogging again after almost 3 weeks, and it is now almost 2 a.m on November 22. At about 9 a.m on Nov. 21 the first snow of the season hit the heartland, and it is nasty outside. Not really cold, but icy and windy. So, we have normal winter season weather upon us. Yes, years ago in the winter we went out in it to get to school and to do chores and needed farm work and unless there was a blizzard that can still be remembered 50 years later(and there are a few of them) you did what you had to do whether it was awful cold and snowy or not. The animals had to be cared for. But in an urban setting bad weather means traffic misadventures--so I look forward to a warm globe in a few months.
This thanksgiving day is also Kennedy Murder Day. Nov 22 '63. And it was 44 years ago.
I will try to think now of some things I am Thankful for. I am thankful that my Ma is in fairly good body and mental health in her late 80s. I am thankful that my 2 nephews are getting along good in east Africa working in relief projects. I am thankful that I am still functioning after my diabetic heart attack 5 years ago. I am thankful that a couple of guys I know returned home uninjured from their tours in Iraq. I am thankful that the internet was created, because the thing gives me access to news and info that I would never be able to get otherwise. Sometime I hope to do a whold blog essay on websites I have found that I find interesting. And there are actually some very interesting videos on youtube--especially foreign singers, history-related videos, and other such clips. I will not let anyone disparage the Web, even though it seems to be popular to do so in some 'educated" circles.
I am going to let all you devoted fans of my blog go back to bed now. I am up after a long nap earlier in the evening. You all have a good holiday, and I will return soon. Di di mau!

Return to True Time

Daylight savings time ended just a little while ago, and we are now back on "God's Time." I have not done much productive for the world all of this day. I slept a lot today to try to get rid of the cold and sore back I have had for much of the week, and woke up and functioned for a while in the afternoon, and watched Fox News, which was generally divided between Mushareff declaring martial law in Pakistan and the search for the woman in Chicago whose husband may have killed at least one other of his three previous wives. And Hurricane Noel is causing havoc along the coast of Massachusetts. And I have been reading some interesting political thought blogs, especially one from the Hoover Institute of August '02 on Al Qaeda as a political fantasy. And I found a blog called The Jacksonian Party, which has a long essay trashing Woodrow Wilson and all he stood for. An ususual way to spend a Saturday night, but I kinda enjoy it. Ozzy Osbourne was in town last night for a concert, but I have not yet read the local paper's review of what he did. Nothing on local tv news about him biting a bat, like he did 20+ years ago here, so he must have come and gone from town with no incident. There was really very little local news that was covered tonight, so it must have been a no-news Saturday, except that Iowa and Iowa State both finally won their games. I need to get into the Cornhusker website to see how bad Gobigred got pounded. I think this is going to be all for right now. Next time I may have something really deep and profound to report, but this a.m I ain't got nothin' much. So, you take care for now. Di di mau!

Boom and Burn in the Heartland

An industrial solvents plant on the north side of Des Moines blew up this afternoon. Everyone in the plant got out safely, but the plant burned all afternoon and is still burning at 10 p.m.. Burning barrels of solvent were shot into the air all afternoon 200 feet up, looking like scuds flying in the Gulf War. The scene will be a local legend for a long time. And this evening a guy who worked in the plant contends that 200 barrels of solvent were supposed to be stored in the plant--but at least a thousand were actually inside. So there will be regulatory issues as the whole story is uncovered. I missed all this this afternoon, because I came home from work this afternoon and went to bed and found out about all the excitement when I got up and turned on the local 6 p.m news.
That is the big event around here. Also, the Bears, and Nebraska got beat this weekend, and Kalamazoo College lost their Homecoming game last week to Wisconsin Lutheran, but the Maryville Spoofhounds and the Northwest Missouri State Bearcats won their games. The Red Sox won the World Series. And seven college kids were killed in a fire in a beach house they were sleeping in in South Carolina. And a guy was electrocuted Sunday night in Des Moines while trying to steal copper wire from a live power line.
This is going to be all for right now. My own life this weekend has had little drama in it--sleeping, going to the grocery store and the second hand store, and watching TV, and exploring the internet, and fighting the local traffic. Sometime I should compose a blog entry for posterity on interesting websites I have found. So, you all take care, and I will return with more stuff in the near future. Di di mau!

PreDawn Blog Attack

Ha ha--clever title for this entry. It came from my memory bank of memories of predawn mortar attacks in the Mekong delta way back when. Am up at 5 a.m. after a Friday night sleep session(no partying on Friday night) due to a bad sinus plugup I have had all week. Have spent much of this week with lowlevel flu or whatever it is, and the sky has been dark and gloomy every day, and real winter will arrive some time in the near future, and with all the goofy weather the US has been having we may get a long cold icy and snowy season. That Is Nature, but every fall I get more and more in favor of long warm summers. Wow, this is a cheerful entry. Where is the happiness? I guess I will have to find it or create it.
Have been looking at webnews about the San Diego fire storms of the past week, and found out that at least 270 acres of Ft. Pendleton burned. I was in the San Diego area for a visit in 1975, mostly going up and down the freeways, so what I saw of the area way back then was seen from inside a car, but what the people are going through in the region is much bigger than our disaster in the heartland--the '93 floods. Even if the people involved are very rich and their houses were very expensive, let us forgo any of that sanculotte gunk about how they deserve what they got. I've read a few comments in blog postings saying that--but idiots are a given in the world.
Also, I am spending way too much time in front of the screen, finding interesting websites of a serious information nature. Have been bookmarking local TV station sites, military sites, and US govt sites. I'm still a little rankled at a newspaper article I read relating that some college professors surveyed said that real intellectuals do not look at the internet because it is just a toy for the masses (singling out Republicans, Christians, and teenagers). I am more and more glad that I got far away from the college world decades ago.
After this griping and moaning I have been doing so far, I am going to close for right now. I need to wash my body for my Saturday morning search for something Happy out there in the world, and I will probably look for a few more websites. So, this will be It for now. Di di mau.

Blog in the Dark of an Autumn Night

Here we are at 1 a.m on an October Saturday morn after a long sleep on Friday night to try to get rid of a bout of flu or whatever I have had for several days. Sinus plugup, sore back and butt, and general weariness that has made me very sleepy. Yes, while others party on Friday night I have gotten into a habit of going to bed early and catching up on sleep after having to make my body clock adjust to getting up at 2 a.m all week. I suppose that at least 50 percent of Americans are up working at nighttime hours, so there should be no Poorme on my part, but I am beginning to appreciate the routine of sleeping at night as Nature intended. But then when I have time at night to sleep I spend too much time in front of the laptop, exploring websites.
It has been cold and cloudy and rainy in the heartland all week. I assume that winter and snow and sleet and ice will arrive in a few weeks. But the Groundhog will come out on Feb. 2 and then spring will be just around the corner.
I am beginning to get as overwhelmed by the number of websites online I want to explore as I get overwhelmed by the number of books available at the local bookstore that all probably have info I can use, but my budget keeps me from dropping 30+ bucks for a single book, so I guess my quest for knowledge will have to be centered on websites, which is acceptable, despite the hatred of the internet by intellectuals and college creatures.
Joey Bishop, Teresa Brewer, and Deborah Kerr have all died in the last couple of days. Kerr especially got lousy coverage on celeb TV. She was a great actress and beautiful, and her movie career was first class, but no one in the showbiz (Norville et al) TV world seemed to know much about her life and career. As usual Brit S. got all the news coverage, along with Degeneres and her dog troubles. RIP Deborah--we loved you.
There is an interesting story in the Drugereport via Breitbart that the Chinese are planning to send 14 men into space to the space station. There is a rule that any legal group in China has to include three Communists. And a Chinese official has a comment on what a spiritual mystic experience Chinese Communism is. It sounds like something said by Madame Mao. It would be an interesting topic for a polysci class to study; Communism as a spiritual experience.
I am going to close this blog for right now. The fingers are not working well, and I need to go back to bed, or get into some more news sites. Hopefully I will have something incredible to offer next time we meet. I hope I do not feel so sagbag and am healthy and chipper next time. Di di mau!

Blog on a Dark October Saturday Night

A gloomy wet night in the season before winter gets here. Exciting Nascar race tonight. The news can be found in Drudge and numerous other news websites. Jane Wyman and Alice Ghostly both passed away in the last month. There is an interesting article in MSN about how babyboomer-aged people do not read the internet (the article centered on a bunch of college-types at the U of Iowa). Well, I peruse the internet with great devotion.
A friend died the other day and I went to his funeral this afternoon. He planned his funeral which was a rocknroll-Packers-Masonic ceremony. As seems to happen in life we had drifted away from one another for several years, and had not gotten together for a long time. Now he is gone and I wish we could have gotten together before he died of cancer, and all I have now are the memories of good times we had when we were buddies. Chuck, I will miss you and we had some good wild times.
There is some stuff online about a bio due out soon about Charles Schultz, detailing what a miserable human being he really was. And I am part way through a big bio by Hamby relating what a lier and incompetent Harry Truman was. And I found a new book at Borders' contending that no one who has ever written Anything about World War 2 knew what they were talking about. So much for the fun of reading.
But I did find out that the crumbling old hotel in my hometown was once a hideout for Jesse James and there was a secret passage behind the wall in the room he always stayed in that he could use to get out of the hotel. Ma said that Grandpa had heard the stories about the room and the passage, but I had never heard of it. Now I know some town lore.
The Nascar drivers have been wrecking all night at Lowes'.
This has not been a Fun week, so I this is not a happy blogging tonight. So, you take care, and I will try to have some more stuff the next time I hit the keys. Di di mau!

Blogging during Prison Break

Great October night--not too hot and not too cool, after record-setting hot temperatures all over the country yesterday, and high humidity for the last several days. Last Monday there were a couple of nasty tornadoes that tore up a couple of farm towns east of Des Moines, and in DM that afternoon there was a really strange catagory 1 minitornado that smashed up some cars in the local airport parking ramp. One guy died in the heat in Chicago running the Chi Marathon and about 400 runners passed out. Saturday night a 20 year old town cop killed 6 teenagers in a house in north Wisconsin, and then he killed himself or was shot in a shootout. The news is still developing on this tragedy. TV Guide had a little obituary of Flower, the head Mama Meerkat, who was bitten by a snake. Denver Broncos got pounded awful yesterday by San Diego, and The BEARS pulled off a 27-20 win over the packers. Ha ha. There was a riot in Denver at a Columbus Day parade between a bunch of NatAms and ItalianAms. I found a Samoan news website which mentioned that at least 6 Samoan soldiers have been killed in Iraq this year (nothing in the MSM about things like this). Looking up UK news online I found that Mr. Speaker Weatherill of the House of Commons had died in the spring at age 86. He was the first Speaker we got to see on CSpan, wearing his wig. A couple of obits of his detailed how much trouble he had with PM Thatcher. A guy in Des Moines grew a 1600 lb squash-a world record. Much more world news and more prominent people have passed on recently, but I need to do more perusing of newssites to collect more news. And Pavarotti passed away in July, and left 3 different wills, which is giving Italian lawyers headaches. I am going to avoid trying to rehash the Spears and Lohan doings of the last month or so. I had a discussion with an amigo about whether celeb antics should get so much news coverage. Moi contends that this kind of stuff is the stuff of human behavior and can be studied to learn the ways of human beings. Oh, one more thing; the Weekly World News went out of business last month. Now we will have no more news about Bat Boy, and the world's fattest cat, and the 300 lb Japanese baby, and the space alien who has been hanging around DC for years. On the Young and the Restless Victor and Nikki are getting divorced again, and on General Hospital Lulu has moved in with Jason and Spinelli. Luke will probably hit the fan when he finds out. So far on Prison Break this p.m one guy has gotten his throat cut and one guy has been shot in the head.
This is going to be all for right now. I have to get ready for the dirty Charlie show on CBS. I am trying to get my living organized to get more blogging done more often, but in about an hour I have to get housework done and then go to bed. So, you all take care. Di di mau!

Very Early A.M. Return to Blogging

Wow! I have returned to blogging, after almost 3 months of depriving the planet of my wisdom. And after taking a long sleep on Friday night I am sitting at the laptop after getting up and going through a bunch of online newspapers , newsagency stuff, think tank reports, Fora speeches, and Youtube videos of pop music from around the world. A world tour online. I wish I could get the time and patience to do a regular online summary of all the newsbits from around the world coming across the web-ala Drudge-but I have somewhat poor eyesight due to the diabetes, and after an hour or so looking at a screen I get worn down. and have to shut the laptop off and go to bed. It is hard enough to keep track of local news daily. Nejad at Columbia and who said and did what during the current political campaigning is enough to overwhelm the little brain. I do not know how Drudge and Hewitt do it every day. I have gotten obsessed with all the stuff on Youtube, and have gotten away from reading much in the way of blogs, but hopefully can get some kind of organization worked out to keep a cyberspace education going--and I actually have gotten back into reading some Books I got at a bargain book store--bios of John Adams, Khrushchev, Harry Truman, and Stalin, and some histories of the Gulag. Now we should go to a new paragraph.
Found an interesting news bit on probably Hugh Hewitt that W is secretly feeding HRC info on what is going on with Iraq policy--since W thinks HRC will be the next president, so she should know what she will be in for when she takes over from him. Interesting.
Since I last blogged in July a bridge fell into the Mississippi in Minneapolis and killed at least 13 people. The Move-On-General Petraeus-Betrayus flap has taken place, Pavarotti, Bev Sills, Regine Crespin, and Jerry Hadley(who killed himself) have died, and I found out that last March Betty Hutton died. Michael Vick has been nailed for running a dog fighting setup, and OJ is back in trouble--but I will leave him to other reporters, and not try to rehash all the OJ news.
Interesting story in Des Moines last week; Martin Luther King Jr.'s niece was in town to speak at a local high school, but was cancelled by school honchos after some Liberal parents howled that the lady was non grata-- because she turns out to be a black female conservative Republican, and she is against abortion. So she gave her talk at a local Catholic high school. That situation has hapened before here--white yuppie liberals vs. black conservatives.
I am not going to comment on the current problems with my Chicago Bears.
I am going to close for now, and as I always say when I turn out to not blog for a month or more, I hope to get something going so that I can blog more frequently than I do anymore. This will be all for right now. Di di mau you all!

A Summer Night in July

Hello there, fans and devotees of this blog. We are here again blogging just for you or for me. This will probably be a really impressionistic (wow, what college lingo) rehash of current events in the past 2 weeks, because I have done little paper or internet news research, and have been relying on tv news for what has been going on. I need to start looking at a lot of the web newssites I have bookmarked, but have been busy at earning and spending my pay, and have been either working or sleeping. So, what has been burned into my brain about what is happening on earth is that the US is due to be attacked by Qaeda in a big nasty way, according to Chertoff, who said he had a "gut feeling" we were due to get attacked sometime soon. And the liberals jumped all over him for not producing paper facts to prove his gut feelings. And NewsMax is promoting a book by Paul Williams contending that Qaeda has a full arsenal of nukes ready to be set off, if they do not decompose in their metal shells from the radiation leaking out. The Pakistan army is supposedly trying to move into the wilderness to finally get Laden and Zawahiri, so we will see what happens. And a big earthquake has done a job on Japan. And McCain's campaign is about to crash, due to lack of money and interest by voters. Opera singers Bev Sills and Regine Crespin have both died, and opera tenor Jerry Hadley the other day shot himself and is now off life support. He lost his voice and career; what a sad mess he was in.
Recently rented a tape of The Jolson Story and a tape of Top Banana. Was not as bowled over by the "classic" Jolson Story as I had hoped to be. A very cleaned up version of Jolson's messy life, even if it did have some bite to it at the end. Top Banana was a filmed version of Phil Silvers' broadway play about a vaudeville comic doing an early 50s tv variety show(supposedly based on Milton Berle). Interesting to see Silvers do a full movie as the star, and a young Rose Marie had a small part in it, but more of a curiosity piece than a good movie.
Jolson is a big item on Youtube now. Supposedly he was an awful human being, but from the videos of him on U he was a great entertainer.
We are having a hot spell in the midwest in July, with temps in the 90s, but that is actually par for July. Farmwork weather--haying and chopping weeds time.
I do not know what I have accomplished with this blog entry, but I am going to send it out into cyberspace as it is. I have found a web list of all the people on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and in the next blog I may discuss some of them I find it interesting that they are honored--some of the old silent movie stars no one remembers anymore, but are in the Wikipedia.
This will be all for right now, friends. Di di mau!