It's Not About A Long Weekend

 

To my ancestors who only made it home in a box now buried in our family graveyard:  Thank you, Grandpa.

Rainy Night, Book, and Bubby

 

I May Have To Leave The Community Website

Because the bears aren't the least bit interested in hurting their kids.

Because the 6 inch snake they found on their deck isn't interested in biting them.

Because if the temporary invasion of the 17 year cicadas freaks them out...

...along with the bears and coyotes and snakes...

THEN MAYBE THEY SHOULD HAVE STAYED IN THE DAMNED CITY!!!!

But apparently once you get emphatic about such things you get thrown off the site.

The Signs Are Coming Down

Update:  Apparently I missed the announcement, but our guv DID announce that vaccinated folks are now free from the face diaper requirement.  Not that I have any intention of showing my "papers" anyplace.

Our governor has promised that he will free us peasants from his mask order on June 20, in celebration of West Virginia's birthday. Like most of these bozos he doesn't seem to be aware that we aren't slobbering in gratitude over his munificence.

I'd like to ask him why he's no longer in the "I follow the science" category.  Of course, that phrase is one of the most useless bits of parroting to come out of the past year.

But over the last few days I've noticed that those "Mask Required" signs have been disappearing around here, despite the fact that as far as I know neither the governor nor the local health department has blessed us with permission to take off the face diapers.  And I'm seeing more and more people, including some store and restaurant staff, blessedly naked of face.  

I think people are finally doing what should have been done a year ago:  quietly saying "Stuff it."

They're Baaaaaack!

Brood X of the 17 year cicadas has finally started appearing on my property.

17 years underground, emerge, mate and lay eggs, and die.  By the millions.  I'm curious as to what my cats and the pup will think of them once they really get going and start landing on the screens and porches.

As We Wait For Jim Justice To "Follow The Science"...

The Fauci's Prayer

-------

Our Fauci,  who art in D.C.,

Hallowed be thy name,

The virus comes,

 and won't be done

On earth until you say so

Give us today, a mask mandate 

And forgive us our masklessness,

As we forgive those who are maskless among us, 

And lead us all into vaccination, 

But deliver us from covid

For thine is the nation and the power, and the glory 

For ever and ever 

Amen 

H/T The Bruce Elliot Show

You Know How After A While...

 ...you stop bothering to read things like "People" while waiting at the dentist's office or while in line at the grocery store?  Except maybe if the "National Enquier" headline is "The Sad Last Days Of..." and you think "Oh, is he/she still alive?"  Yeah.  Been like that for years.  I don't watch current TV and I don't listen to current music.  So I have no clue who those people are, or who they've dated/married/divorced, etc.  Don't care, either.

But I just finished this book - a yard sale acquisition:

And I knew every actor, every director, every author, every scriptwriter in this book.  And it was bloody good fun.

Perhaps it shouldn't be fun:  it basically chronicles the rather spectacular alcoholic performances of Hollywood greats from the Silent Era (first up - Fatty Arbuckle) through "New Hollywood" (last up - Natalie Wood.) And you really shouldn't laugh sometimes - a lot of these people, like Judy Garland, were fighting demons most of us can't even comprehend.  But then there's the pranks the likes of a completely blitzed Buster Keaton would get involved with and you can't help thinking "Dang.  I wish I could think up something like that!"  And the whole thing with Charlie Chaplin and the belief that iodine would prevent STDs...yeah...As a Chaplin fan I'm still trying to get THAT picture out of my mind.  Richard Harris is quoted as saying "I often sit back and think, I wish I'd done that, and find out later that I already have." And the number of my favorites who periodically woke up with a blinding hangover and no idea where they were is rather a lot.  They also made a lot of fabulous movies while stoned, drunk, and/or hungover.  

I'm pretty amazed at the sheer capacity of consumption sometimes, and that some of them managed to live as long as they did while downing quarts of hard liquor and cases of beer every day, with an off day being just a few bottles of wine.  And still act and still write and still direct even while being holy terrors:  Peckinpah was constantly a drugged out, alcoholic nut case, carried a gun on the set, and peed on the screen when daily rushes for Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid turned out to be out of focus.  The Apocalypse Now hotel scene was shot on Martin Sheen's 36 birthday, and he steadily drank himself into a drunken oblivion that is preserved in the movie.  Earlier greats had a variety of comments on the subject: "You can't drown yourself in drink.  I've tried: you float." (John Barrymore 1882-1942); "I'm no alcoholic; I'm a drunkard.  There's a difference.  A drunkard doesn't go to meetings." (Jackie Gleason 1916-1987); "I put liquor in my milk, in my coffee, and in my orange juice.  What do you want me to do, starve to death?' (Francis Farmer 1913-1970); "Tequila makes your head hurt. Not from your hangover. From falling over and hitting your head." (John Wayne 1907-1979).

Sandwiched in between are tales of the legendary hotels, clubs and bars and how a great many familiar and not so familiar drinks came to be.  The Moscow Mule, for instance: too many cases of Smirnoff vodka and a surplus of house made ginger beer and Broderick Crawford as a taste tester.  And then there was Ava Gardner's Mommy's Little Mixture: dump every type of liquor you can find into a jug or pitcher.  I'll pass on trying that one.

Redefined

 

All I Got To Say Is...

 ...I have toilet paper.  Lots of toilet paper.  And I'm sort of regretting that I ruined my excuse for not mowing the lawn by having bought a battery powered mower to do my hills with a couple years ago.

Tanning

Caught a little bit of someone's YouTube or Tiktok or some other commentary this morning.  Or afternoon.  Maybe it was Grace Curley's show out of Boston.  Streaming radio can be even more confusing than catching the weather report for Buffolo, NY, on your AM radio when you are driving back to college in Morgantown, WV, in the 70s before US 68 was built.

Anyway, one of the Eternally Offended was making it clear that if you deliberately get a sun tan you are committing a heinous act of cultural appropriation.

Anyone want to give me odds on whether or not that same person believes that whacking off a weenie and putting on a dress changes a boy into a girl?

1:30 AM and GACK!

The bedroom smoke alarm went off.  Not an annoying beep: a full blown alarm.  Me, cats, dog - rocket a foot in the air.  No smoke, though.  None at all.  So my unsteady self climbed on stool and yanked the offending alarm out of the ceiling.  There are alarms in the other bedrooms and in the hall and once mine was was disconnected from electricity and the battery pulled out (the alarms are interconnected) there was blessed silence.  Alarm is less than a year old.  Battery is no older - I replaced all the alarms and batteries last summer.

Copper refused to come back to bed.  Once I got back to sort-of sleep I had bad dreams and drooled all over my pillow the rest of the night.

Haven't put the damn thing back yet.

Er...Was Heinlein a Pervert?

Once in a gazillion years my book cases actually get cleared off and everything is dusted and wiped down.  The reno work in the house produced about a ton of dust that got into everything so it was time.  And along the way I found old paperback books that I had forgotten about and wasn't sure why they were still there other than maybe sentimentality.  I know why I have Bradbury and Burroughs - I still actually read them and haven't found a complete compendium of them to take the place of the fragile paperbacks I bought in the 60s.  I was able to replace my Lovecraft with a single hardback volume but not John Connor of Mars or Ray Bradburys because, well Bradbury wrote I-don't-know-how-many books and I probably couldn't afford to replace him with hardbacks now even if they were all gathered together.  And the Mars compendiums only seem to have some of the books, not all of them. I've looked.

But I found some Asimov and some Heinlein and some other authors I couldn't remember on the shelves and decided to read them because, well, I couldn't remember them.

Heinlein was one of the  sci-fi gods of my era.  So The Door Into Summer, first published in 1956, was my first pick.

Um.  OK. It was interesting to see what he thought 1970 and 2000 would look like.  And he had a cat. But I kept thinking of "The Jetsons" robot Rosey.

Still OK, although his idea that Los Angeles would become a magnificent place has fallen a tad short in reality.

But partway through the book I started to get uncomfortable.  His partner has a small daughter that the main character, Danny, adores. He's Uncle Danny.  OK so far.  But in the midst of long cryo-sleeps and time travel you realize both that Danny only knows this child from age about 6 to age 11 AND that he's sexually attracted.  At an older age, sure, but he doesn't know her at an older age. And at age 11 she asks him to marry her and he excitedly agrees.  There's Long Sleeps in between, but WTHF!?

There's a happily-ever-after ending.  But for all that Heinlein brought me dreams of rockets and space travel I wouldn't let him around my granddaughter after reading this book.