Your Tax Dollars At Work (and a 15-minute delay on the highway)
“And this was the artist’s Black Period, noted more for its playful use of browns and other earth tones than for the use of black which of course prevailed throughout his career.”
Lava still looks hot–don’t touch!
I think I saw Spock do a mind-meld with that thing.
Huh! Next time I won’t pre-heat the cast iron on the BBQ before I put in the cornbread batter.
A simple tale...with apologies for contributing to the millions and billions of cat photos on the Internet.
Once there were two kittens: Bayou…
Bayou. Christmas Day 2015.
…and his brother Chingu…
Chingu. Christmas Day 2015.
Bayou and Chingu were brothers. They were born in June 2015. They did (almost) everything together.
Bayou (left) and Chingu. December 2015.
One day in August, not long after they quit drinking milk from their mother, Bayou and Chingu were put up for adoption. This meant they now lived together in a small cage at a local animal shelter until someone would adopt them. They lived there almost four months. Finally they were adopted by a couple who spoke Korean. They named the pink-nosed one Friend (Chingu). They named the black-nosed one after the ancient kingdom Buyeo where the ancestors of all Koreans lived.
Or maybe the people who adopted them weren’t Korean. Maybe a nice person at the shelter spoke Korean and thought, “These cats need special names because they’re really special.” But if so, they didn’t know how to spell Buyeo. Or maybe the first story is true and the shelter just didn’t hear it right. Whatever the reason, the black-nosed cat became Bayou.
Bayou visited the animal shelter in 2014 when he got sick, but in May 2015 he and his brother were given back to the shelter and put up for adoption again. Their human “mother” had developed allergies to cats. They soon found another home with a man who already had two cats. He tried to like them, and maybe his other cats did too, but when it came to cats, Bayou and Chingu only liked each other.
December 2015.
They beat up the man’s cats. Worse, they ganged up on them. In August 2015, just a couple months later, they were back at the shelter again. They started beating up all the other cats in the common room. “What should we do?” worried the volunteers. Their supervisor said, “We must put them in foster care. It will only be until we can find new parents for them.” But four months went by, and no one wanted the two brothers who liked each other but no one else.
The calendar turned through those months: September. October. November. And halfway through December, I spotted their photograph. “They look spunky. They look like fun. They look like they need a home because who wants three-and-a-half-year-old-cats as a package deal?” My wife agreed. We went to the shelter just before Christmas and asked to see them.
“Oh, they don’t live here,” said the person at the desk. “They weren’t very well behaved so we put them in foster care. We will have to get them for you. Come back tomorrow.” We went home both happy that we still might get them and sad because we hadn’t seen any other cats we would want to be friends with. What if they didn’t like us? Or what if we didn’t like them?
On December 20th we came back with a great big carrier. We met Bayou and Chingu. They were friendly but in different ways. They didn’t indicate if they wanted to go with us, because they were just happy to be out of the large cage where they had been living for four months. We took them home and showed them the room with the dirt, which is very important for cats. They had different reactions. Bayou wanted out of that room immediately. “Okay, fine, I’ve seen the dirt. Now let me explore,” he said.
Bayou meets the neighborhood. December 2015.
Chingu said, “I see dirt but right now I need a very dark place.” He chose the linen closet. A little later he discovered a bed.
Chingu eyes his situation. December 2015.
Today I only know two Korean words: Buyeo and Chingu. Eight years ago I didn’t know any. I said, “We have to change their names.” My wife nodded. “I know!” I said, “this black-nosed one is so open and friendly, he’s got to be a Benny!” “Yes!” she agreed and asked, “but what about the pink-nosed one who likes me?” I thought about how he raced around the house, especially when he seemed scared. “Well…we could call him The Jet.” My wife frowned. “You know, Benny and The Jet?” I grinned. To my surprise she agreed to try it. We didn’t like it, and neither did Chingu. “His name should start with a C-H anyway,” I admitted. “Let’s call him Charlie. He seems a bit neurotic, kind of like Charlie Brown.”
We got them a big condo to play on, but Charlie indicated he mostly would be sleeping there…a lot.
Charlie at rest. March 2016.
They had spent their previous year in cages for much of the time. They seemed to delight in finding new places to sleep:
Benny the audiophile, appreciating a fine stereo amp. March 2016.Charlie demonstrates his lifelong passion for freshly-dried laundry. January 2016.
Benny likes bags and baskets:
Benny prefers baskets. Charlie (L) doesn’t totally get it. April 2016.Square or round, makes no difference to Benny. January 2016.
Mostly, Charlie likes sleeping on Benny:
Benny (L) and Charlie. April 2016. [previously published]
In their first eight months with us, Benny and Charlie spent two vacations at the vet (in tiny cages again), and then they endured a move to a new house. Benny, of course, enjoyed it and helped out:
Benny supervised the move and checked boxes for food. September 2016.
Charlie got very stressed. First he hid under the kitchen sink. Then he climbed on top of the cupboards and stared at us and panted.
Charlie hides out. September 2016.
It had three floors. They liked to race around in it and slide on the throw rugs covering the hardwood floors. We didn’t tell them this house was temporary. Eight months later we moved again. Now they have fewer windows to look out of, but they have…..a screened-in deck!
Charlie (L) and Benny thank their human servants for buying them a deck. June 2017.
The boys have settled in over the past seven years. Charlie can’t believe he now gets to eat almost every time he wants to (which is often). He has gained five pounds. Benny still weighs the same. Benny licked off his fur in patches, spent years on medications, and finally decided to stop. It might have been allergies. It might have been a psychological problem. Charlie started licking off his fur in patches last year, so there’s that. They’ve settled down now that they’re 12 years old.
They hope Dad keeps taking their photos and making them famous, so long as it pays for the super-expensive cat food they’ve insisted is the ONLY BEST kind. Their story isn’t over, but this tale is. Benny and Charlie would send you their best, but they only like each other–and now, Mom and Dad.
It’s 86 with a “feels like” of 93, and I’ve been home from a trip of errands for about 30 minutes. After I couldn’t find a third of what I wanted at the Lowe’s gardening center and finding out that the prescription I needed to pick up had been filled at my old pharmacy instead of my new one, I negotiated a ridiculous traffic pattern to cross the street to a grocery store. Parking halfway up one aisle, this is what I observed as I got closer to the store:
You know those handicapped parking spaces with the extra wide ‘stripey section’ to assist those who need more room getting out of a vehicle? A nondescript sedan, an older Chevy or something, swung in front of me quickly and parked haphazardly in that space such that it was half in the parking space and half in the stripey section. Sensitive to these things both because my late mother and father both needed handicapped parking, and because one of our closest friends now seriously needs it, I noted it had no handicapped license plate, nor did I see a placard hanging from the rear-view mirror. I saw only a driver, a 25-35 year-old. She popped out of the car without any obvious ambulatory issues, left the car running, and zipped into the store ahead of me. “Oh, probably an employee picking up a paycheck or something,” I thought. A bit cheeky, but at least just a minute or so. Nope. She pulled out a shopping cart and took off into the store.
Seriously? I felt like going back to her car and seeing if I could move it to a different parking space. (No, I didn’t, but it sounds good. People pack lethal force in this state.)
I’m reading Constance by Lawrence Durrell, set in the years immediately prior to and at the beginnings of World War II. It’s the third book of Durrell’s Avignon Quintet. Last night Constance has returned to Avignon as a Red Cross liaison to the Vichy French. In the passage I read last night, she is shocked when she realizes that the Germans stationed there (who in actuality run everything) aren’t embarrassed by their actions in executing 20 villagers because someone fired on a tank; are not embarrassed by collecting all bicycles in the area and destroying them with two tanks because now no one can take messages to the supposed resistance in the hills; are not embarrassed by seriously discussing the processing of Jews for the camps in Vichy.
This lack of embarrassment, exemplified by the young woman this afternoon, continues to defy my brain’s ability to parse many behaviors of the past ten years, mostly political ones. I eschew politics on this blog. I merely will say how disappointed I am that a large majority of centrist politicians have capitulated to their respective fringe elements, and worse, so have voters. The arena of civil discourse demands recognition of differing opinions. It demands certain social niceties.
Whatever. The Curmudgeon has an appointment with the Old Fogey Police. Apparently I need an OF license now that I’m 70.
New hydrangea on the left, older “parent” on the right. June 2024.
A year ago our only ‘normal’ hydrangea–we have an oak-leaf hydrangea–popped out a volunteer shoot promising to be a new plant. A colony if you will. This year it bloomed. It did not bloom like the parent. Not even close. At first, I thought, “well, they’re a little more pink-tinged than the parent, but the parent has pink edges….” but look at this. They aren’t even close. Nature is wonderful, is it not?
A few hours ago I surpassed seven decades upon the planet. My first memories occur somewhere around three to four years of age; make that six and a half decades of consciousness. I rode tricycles and bicycles with playing cards clothes-pinned into the spokes for noise. I saw the first television come into our house, the advent of easily available color TV’s, and the beginnings of data processing centers (long before personal computers became a thing). I celebrated the first humans going into space. I cowered under my desk as I practiced “what to do in the event of a nuclear attack.”
I entered my teens as we kicked off the Summer of Love (“we” being a rather generous term for my inclusion in it). I protested the Vietnam War in a lukewarm manner. I wore strange clothes, even considering what teens normally do.
I campaigned with my father in 1960 for presidential candidate Barry Goldwater. I voted for the first time in 1972 for George McGovern. I watched as Nixon resigned rather than face impeachment. (Imagine that, Bill. Donald.) I jump aboard the personal computing “thing” in 1982 and never looked back. I became a newshound; a teacher; a cog in corporate America; a consulting ‘expert’; and a retired, lazy bum.
So what? Every single person born before 1960 can pretty much say the same. It’s because looking back shocks one. My grandparents saw the advent of cars which radically changed society, and they knew grandparents or great-grandparents which served in America’s Civil War. My parents watched as first radio and then TV made changes almost as radical. And those of us of a certain age have witnessed computers do the same as the automobile. I cannot convey the visceral feeling of being the head of this time-worm, with a tail stretching back to days which did not know any color of T-shirt but white, which never saw a man wear hair which touched or covered his ears, which had just completed two significant wars in a little over 15 years.
You’ll have to experience it yourself. It’s a trip.
I’ve been thinking about Pop Music a bit the past week or two, prompted by being forced to listen to my wife’s choice of music in our car one day. It’s some “hits of the 70’s, 80’s, and 90’s” piece of something-or-other…unless you like that sort of thing, then it’s a wonderful FM station which plays all the greatest songs you know and love. I’ve assiduously avoided listening to radio from the first opportunity I had to not listen to it, sometime in my late teens or early 20’s. I suppose some readers don’t understand what I’m talking about. Through high school we listened to music in two places, basically: cars and our bedrooms. We had AM radio in the cars and vinyl records in our bedrooms. If you really got into it and had deep pockets, you bought a big Wollensak reel-to-reel tape machine, but if you were a wannabe like my brother and me, you bought a cheap little portable recorder and stuck the painfully crappy microphone in front of a tiny transistor radio speaker to record “off the air”.
In small-market Spokane only two radio stations catered to young people and their shocking tastes in music: KNEW (neé KJRB by the time I left high school), and KXLY. All popular music of whatever genre mixed freely on these stations. No FM station played popular music until around the time I entered college when KREM-FM suddenly started an “underground” playlist. Underground radio featured stoned out DJ’s: “Hi, I’m John. Yeah. We’ll be playing some heavy tunes for a while. I hope you like them.” We programmed the buttons on the radio–oh Lord, do I have to explain how car radios worked back then? Those too?–to the two AM stations and became adept at punching the button for whichever one wasn’t playing a song we loathed, which happened frequently. You’ll understand in another paragraph.
But back to that moment a week ago when I listened to many songs I hadn’t heard in years. The one which sticks in my head is “If This Is It” by Huey Lewis and the News. I’m going to hate myself for looking that up and reminding my brain about it: I had a viral ear-worm for days after hearing that song. It’s not that I don’t appreciate Mr Lewis, it’s that I don’t particularly like that specific song. “I Wanna New Drug” has sentiment I can get behind. “The Heart of Rock & Roll” zips along quite nicely. But a slow near-ballad which basically says, “do you see this going where I think it’s going” struck me then and continues to as ridiculously mundane. Maybe you like it. Fine, you’re entitled because we all ask music to deliver different things and if the song delivers, great…for you. I like absolutely stupid songs because of a bass line or because the singer’s voice seems to mock the very words being sung, or because it has a frenetic beat, or a multitude of other reasons. I’m not going to mention two extremely popular groups which demographics say I should love, and I can’t stand them. I lost a friend over that once.
Listening to my wife’s radio station, I had a startling realization. I had been getting pretty egotistic about how broad my musical horizons are. I like country, blues, rock, blues-rock, folk, world/ethnic, jazz of various ilks, classical, a little bit of hip-hop and…pop. My enforced listening session in the car showed me I don’t really like pop per se, I like it very selectively. I protested to myself about all that pop music I liked from my youth. That’s when it hit me: we like all those songs which formed us as we left childhood, negotiated adolescence, and became adults. After that? Not so much. We went in different directions. Some folks I’ve met never went anywhere. They only listen to songs from the oeuvre when they were 10-25.
Today proves my point. Yesterday I finished chores and declared it to be Birthday Week. I’ve decided one day isn’t big enough to handle 70 years. Until Tuesday June 11th, I’m celebrating. Today unfolded at a leisurely pace, pointed toward some music listening, writing, and a Phillies game. I decided to listen to music from the beginning of my listening life, and then realized “the beginning” eludes definition. I settled for the year my pre-teen fan-tasy grew into musical appreciation: 1966. Until then I’d focused on whatever TV and radio served up: The Beatles, early The Rolling Stones, The Monkees. In 1965 my brother and I began buying a few different bands on 45rpm records, and in 1966 I got my first 33rpm LP, The Young Rascals. It coincided with my birthday and the end of the school year. I ran out of the schoolroom never to return to elementary school, and I ran into adolescence with a newfound appreciation for the melding of pop, soul, and rock which had started to occur.
I decided to re-introduce myself to 1966 by looking at the Top 40 lists for the year and selecting songs to listen to from it. Locating a wonderful site called Top 40 Weekly, I selected 1966 to be presented with the Top 40 chart for every single week in 1966! Wow. Here’s the beginning of the first one from January of that year:
Top 40 Weekly’s chart for the beginning of 1966.
This proves my point. (Of course, it’s self-referential, but nevermind.) I look at the first song and start singing the lyrics. I look at the second one and smile and hear Paul singing the title words. Likewise with #3 and #4. I’ll admit #5 threw me for a minute–I’m more familiar with “Catch Us If You Can” by that group, as heard on the Lloyd Thaxton show. Giving it a play, though, it came back to mind. How about #6? Check. And #7? Check. Not until #8 did I say to myself, “punch the button.” I like a few Righteous Brothers songs, but they carried a crooning 50’s style of music into the 60’s, and it didn’t play well. But who can’t smile listening to #9?
Then we hit #10. Lord knows how Eddy Arnold managed to get a charting song out of that number. I felt the revulsion rise up. Today’s form of button-pushing, the skip-track button on the streaming service came into play quickly. The remaining songs? I smiled again at #11; sang the lyrics to #12 with my wife; and wondered how #’s 13 and 14 got on the list. I don’t recall ever hearing them. The Shangri-Las managed to push out a charting song in 1966? You gotta admire that, even if the song was horrible. (I never heard that one either.) Gary Lewis’s song typified his talentless group, but made me remember “This Diamond Ring” so it wasn’t worthless. I couldn’t find #17 on Tidal, and then a relaxed wide smile–the Beatles again. Before there were LP’s in my life, there were 45’s:
Both songs in the top 20 starting January 1966.
I couldn’t find Ramsey Lewis Trio’s version of “Hang On Sloopy” and wonder what the heck a jazz trio could’ve done with The McCoys’ big hit. The Beach Boys were a selective thing for me, and #20 didn’t hit the spot. I continued through the list until I hit #40. It kinda made the whole journey worthwhile: “Lies” by The Knickerbockers. I loved that song; still do. They had another great one as shown at the top of this post.
The final 45 I bought occurred in 1976. I bought it only because I knew I would never like the album, but I wanted the song for posterity’s sake:
“The king is dead but not forgotten…this is a song about Johnny Rotten” –from “My My, Hey Hey” by Neil Young.
Our musical likes have more to do with where we grew up and what we listened to at the time, than anything objectively wonderful about the music. We like what we like, and we don’t what we don’t. Objective criticism fails precisely because it rejects subjectivity. Do I like “bad” songs? You bet. Do I dislike “good” ones? True. Are you totally inexplicable to me because you like “A White Shade Of Pale”? Abso-effing-lutely.
