Archive for December 2021
⚡Stupid Newspaper Headlines⚡ Leave a comment
12/05/2021 Suffering Fools Leave a comment
I thought I would get this semi-political post on its way before the drumbeat of Christmas and New Year’s drowns out almost everything until January. I’ve consistently had very few nice things to say about the government and its politicians. I once leaned to the political right but in truth it’s gotten to the point where you really can’t tell the political parties apart. Most people would rather be known as Independents rather than Republican or Democrat. As I’m a fan of the English language I decided that maybe I should make an attempt to soften my rhetoric a little. So, in the future my new term for these people will be “fools”, who are being “foolish”, and accomplishing nothing but “foolishness”.
Dictionary Definition
fool’ish
Resulting from poor showing a lack of sense; ill considered; unwise: a foolish action, a foolish speech.
Lacking forethought or caution. Trifling, insignificant, or paltry.
It sounds pretty tame to me and maybe it’s too tame. I’m afraid that at times I won’t be able to control my anger and an F-bomb or two may make an appearance. Oh well, I’m only human and “to err is human, to forgive divine” after all. I’m still working hard on reaching the “divine” stage. Every expert or intellectual feels a certain responsibility to make some grand quote on the term “foolish” and one or two are actually worth repeating. Here are few I’ve found but I make no guarantees as to their worth.
- “A foolish man tells a woman to stop talking, but a wise man tells her that her mouth is extremely beautiful when her lips are closed.”
- “You may fool all the people some of the time, you can even fool some of the people all of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time.” Abraham Lincoln
- “You can educate a fool, but you cannot make him think “. The Talmad
And my all-time favorite:
- “He who is born a fool is never cured.” Proverbs
- “Any fool can make a rule, and any fool will mind.” Henry David Thoreau
- “When in doubt, make a fool of yourself. There is a microscopically thin line between being brilliantly creative and acting like the most gigantic idiot on earth. So what the hell, leap.” Cynthia Heimel
- “By the time the fool has learned the game, the players have dispersed.” African Proverb
- “A fool may be known by six things: anger, without cause; speech, without profit; change, without progress; inquiry, without object; putting trust in a stranger, and mistaking foes for friends.” Arabian Proverb
IT IS BETTER TO KEEP YOUR MOUTH CLOSED AND LET PEOPLE THINK YOU A FOOL
THAN TO OPEN IT AND REMOVE ALL DOUBT
12/04/2021 Remembering “The Platters” Leave a comment
A lot of my time when I’m working on this blog, I’m listening to many of the old classic oldies from the mid-50s through the mid-70s. I have hundreds of albums and CDs of that period, but I truly love the groups that came out of the 1950’s the most. As far as I’m concerned, they created rock ‘n roll. Today I initiated my musical time-travel machine and spent an hour back in the 1960’s listening to a long list of songs by the Platters. They are one of those groups that mean quite a lot to me.
As I sat here this afternoon, I was thinking back to the last time I blogged about The Platters, in June of 2006. I was memorializing the death of the last of the group, Herb Reed. I’ve been a faithful listener of their music for most of my life and actually had the good fortune and pleasure of seeing them perform live at a dance club in western Pennsylvania when I was 17 years old. I found Herb’s death especially poignant since he was the actual founder of The Platters. They started in Los Angeles in 1953 winning amateur talent shows and performing nights and weekends up and down the California coast. Their music remains sweet and as smooth as honey. Even though they’re all gone now, they’ll never really be gone for me. Their music will live forever as it should, it’s the best.
Their music also ties me directly to my paternal grandfather. Many an afternoon was spent with him watching an old black and white, 5″, TV while he sat in his favorite chair, smoking his favorite cigars, and telling me stories of his childhood. Oddly enough his fancy humidor where he stored his precious cigars played “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” every time he opened it. I hear that song and Wham! . . . I can smell those cigars, hear those stories, and think about my favorite grandfather. That’s music working its special magic.
THANKS FOR THE MEMORIES
12/04/2021 Christmas Party Time Leave a comment
Here’s a little holiday humor for you:
Jack woke up with a huge hangover after attending his company’s Christmas party. He didn’t even remember how he’d gotten home from the party. As bad as he was feeling, he wondered if he’d done anything wrong.
He forced himself to open his eyes, and the first thing he saw was a couple of aspirins next to a glass of water on the side table. And, next to them, a single red rose! Jack sat up and saw his clothing in front of him, all clean and pressed. He looked around the room and saw that it was in perfect order, spotlessly clean. So was the rest of the house.
He took the aspirins, and cringed when he saw a huge black eye staring back at him in the bathroom mirror. Then he noticed a note hanging on the corner of the mirror written in red with little hearts on it and a kiss mark from his wife in lipstick: “Honey, breakfast is on the stove. I left early to get groceries to make you your favourite dinner tonight. I love you, darling!” He stumbled to the kitchen and sure enough, there was hot breakfast, steaming hot coffee and the morning newspaper. His son was also at the table, eating. Jack asked, “Son, what happened last night?” “Well Dad, you came home after 3 A.M from the Christmas party, drunk and out of your mind. You fell over the coffee table and broke it, then you puked in the hallway, and got that black eye when you ran into the door.” Confused, he asked his son, “So, why is everything in such perfect order and so clean? I have a fresh red rose, and breakfast is on the table waiting for me. What the hell?”
His son replied, “Oh THAT! Mom dragged you to the bathroom to clean you up last night, and when she tried to take your pants off, you screamed, “Leave me alone bitch, I’m married!'”
20 SHOPPING DAYS LEFT
🌲Christmas Limerick🌲 Leave a comment
The Bad Elf
There was an elf too tired to work,
He called Santa a big fat jerk.
He grabbed up some toys,
Making almost no noise
And fled to Club Med with a clerk.
⚡Stupid Newspaper Headline⚡ Leave a comment
12/03/2021 Wisdom Teeth, Yah Right! Leave a comment
I’m about to write a short story which is a multilevel PSA (Public Service Announcement). I’ll explain what that means in a few minutes but first I wanted to mention a video I watched on Facebook a few days ago. It was a home video taken by Taylor Swift’s mother a short while after she’d had her wisdom teeth removed. She was a bit loopy, confused, and hysterically funny. I laughed along with everyone else until I sat down and started thinking about when I had my wisdom teeth removed. I’ve written about it in the past and it’s still funny now, but it wasn’t funny then as you’ll see.
It’s March of 1974, Richard Nixon resigned the presidency, gas is $.55 a gallon, and I’m getting my damn wisdom teeth removed. I’m a 28-year-old police officer who was being driven to the dentist by his wife anticipating I wouldn’t be able to drive home. The dentist puts me in the chair, fills me with an anesthesia, and removes the wisdom teeth. I woke up a short time later in a side room and had no idea who or where I was. I’m force-fed a painkiller that in company with the residual anesthesia left me a damn zombie. I’m loaded into my car and driven a short distance to a local drugstore to pick up my painkiller prescription and ordered by my wife to stay in the car.
It’s March and it’s cold so I turn on the heater, close the windows, and relax. But only for a moment. Being the conscientious police officer I was, I remembered that I’d left my loaded pistol in the glove compartment. I removed the pistol, popped out the magazine, and placed it in my pocket. So far, so good. Out of habit I took the unloaded weapon and aimed it casually at the end of my foot and dry fired. Oops, I forgot about the round in the chamber and being a relatively good shot, I hit what I aimed at. The bullet punched a neat round hole through the toe of my shoe, removed a small crescent shaped chunk from the side of my big toe, on through the floor of the car, hitting the pavement and ricocheting into the passenger side tire.
I was hammered and stunned all at the same time. The car was filled with smoke, I couldn’t hear a thing and found myself laughing hysterically. In fact, the sound of the shot in the car deafened me for about 15 minutes. My wife arrived, opened the door, and four or five F-bombs later finally asked me if my foot was okay. Of course, her first priority was the tire, seeing as it was her car.
The moral of the story is simple. First never, ever, handle a gun while “stoned” with legal or illegal drugs. Secondly, never operate machinery, vehicles, or small pistols while taking painkillers, and thirdly, never trust a smiling dentist or a soon-to-be ex-wife. That’s my tale of woe and my admission to sheer stupidity. I’m hanging my head in shame even remembering it again. It sounds just as stupid now as it did then. What was I thinking? I obviously wasn’t.
I’LL BE THE STUPIDITY POSTER-BOY FOR THIS ONE
🌲Christmas Limerick🌲 Leave a comment
Old Santa got drunk on warm ale
“I’m too old for Christmas” his wail
“But what of the toys
For the good girls and boys?”
“I’ll have Amazon send them by mail!”
12/02/2021 Synchronicity ??? Leave a comment
The subject of this posting is synchronicity which is just another fancy word for coincidence. Being a former criminal investigator I was trained to believe there is no such thing as coincidence. For quite a few years I truly believed that there weren’t but one midnight shift in the summer of 1974 change all that. I’ll try to keep this as short as possible but I tend to ramble so bear with me.
It was an extremely hot August night; it was Sunday which was one of the slowest days of the week for police business. My partner and I were bored out of our minds because due to the heat there was very little activity. Around 2:30 in the morning we drove back to the state police barracks to check on the desk man who was working alone in the building. We brought him some soft drinks and lunch and we settled down to kill a few minutes.
We walked into the desk area, and it was like a bomb went off in there. He had been given an assignment on a slow night to start purging old reports from the files. We’re talking reports going back for years or more and he had three large trash barrels completely filled with pink slips. The pink slips were slips where each call was recorded and then forwarded to the appropriate officers for follow-up and reports. While both of us felt really sorry for the desk man, we didn’t feel sorry enough to jump into that nightmare. After 20 minutes of whining, we were guilted into helping the poor guy.
I was standing over one of the trash barrels that must’ve contained at least 400 old pink slips. While I was talking to the desk man I randomly picked one up and quickly read the title. Now you got to go back with me a few minutes because an hour or so prior to our visit to the barracks we’d been on a call for a suspicious vehicle at a specific residence at a specific time in the northern part of our county. I looked down at the pink slip I’d picked out of the barrel, and it was dated exactly one year ago and concerned a suspicious vehicle at a specific residence at a specific time in the northern part of the county. It was identical to the call we just completed. Exactly the same residence at exactly the same time and for the same reason. Then it got really weird because the officers assigned to the original complaint were my partner and me. To say we were stunned is an understatement.
To this day I can hardly believe the whole thing happened but it did. I have absolutely no explanation as to how that could have come about which I suppose is what keeps it interesting to this day. It’s made me wonder upon occasion if some of the weird coincidences we hear about are absolutely true.
I just finished reading a book titled Incredible Coincidences, written by Alan Vaughan. He documents dozens and dozens of cases similar to this and of course can offer no explanation for his either. It seems to me that it happens way more than we think if his book is any indicator. I’m still not a big believer in all the weirdness that people alleged is out there, but this incident gave me pause.
WEIRD!
12/01/2021 🌲Christmas Humor🌲 Leave a comment
I found this joke on line and couldn’t resist sharing it with you:
Three men died on Christmas Eve and were met by Saint Peter at the pearly gates. “In honor of this holy season,” Saint Peter said, “You must each possess something that symbolizes Christmas to get into heaven.”
The first man fumbled through his pockets and pulled out a lighter. He flicked it on. “It represents a candle”, he said. “Very well, you may pass through the pearly gates,” Saint Peter said.
The second man reached into his pocket and pulled out a set of keys. He shook them and said, “They’re bells.” Saint Peter said, “You may also pass through the pearly gates.”
The third man started searching desperately through his pockets and finally pulled out a pair of women’s panties. St. Peter looked at the man with a raised eyebrow and asked, “And just what do those symbolize?”
The man replied, “These are Carol’s.”
23 SHOPPING DAYS LEFT
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