That half year

When a child is young her/his parents will often refer to her/him as being “three-and-a-half years old” or “six and a half” or whatever is the correct age. Somehow in those circumstances that half year seems important to more accurately convey the message more correctly and [perhaps] to benefit the junior ego which is often present.

By the time a person is in her/his teens this mention of partial years seems less important, except to stress an upcoming major event. [“Mary is fifteen-and-three-quarters and waiting to take the driving test.”]

I noticed an obit in today’s paper for a woman who was “98 and a half.” I did not know the woman and I wish her family and friends well, but I wonder why they felt the need to list the half year.

Was it to minimize any confusion people might have with another woman of the same age who was only 98? Was the half year something that the deceased had taken great pride in attaining? Was the funeral director or the newspaper person who handled it trying to make it just a little longer in hope of getting a larger fee?

I’m just wondering.

I shuddered a bit the last time I had to add a whole new year to my age. There have already been plenty of them. I am not ashamed of age [I have even referred to myself as a “sexagenarian” on my profile here], but I don’t especially revel in the number.

Or maybe the deceased used to feel that aging herself half a year at a time made aging seem that less drastic.

Whatever the deal, as I said above, I do wish her family and friends well. But it does give me something to think about.

RIP: Capitol City Cacophony?

When I left my job with District 2 Community Council in 1991 I decided to reclaim those first amendment rights which I had surrendered for my employment. So I started an irregularly published newsletter which I labeled Capitol City Cacophony. It was a one-man project using [at first] publishing software fit for a Commodore 64 which I personally financed, printed, and distributed to people who might have an interest in the topic[s] the newsletter was covering.

In 2001 I moved Capitol City Cacophony to a GeoCities web site. It was less expensive but allowed Yahoo to put ads on it. And I lost the ability to control the distribution.

Capitol City Cacophony went fine for a few years, but it seemed as if the software needed to use it kept becoming more averse to my computer and its dialup modem, so I replaced it with Capitol City Musings on Blogspot. More recently, I added this site.

Yahoo will be eliminating all GeoCities sites in the next few days. While I have done little to maintain the site, there is still some stuff on the Capitol City Cacophony pages and it will be gone.

Some of the material will likely reappear in CCM or here or someplace else, but I am not sure where or when. Most of the Jefferson Hill stuff has never made it even to CCC, but I do hope to have a lot of Jefferson Hill content up somewhere sometime.

If anybody wishes to see CCC content you might wish to do so this week.

The Human Sacrifice Network

During arguments at the United States Supreme Court on October 6, 2009, Justice Antonin Scalia posed the question of whether a Human Sacrifice Channel would be permissible. That got me to thinking.

Maybe we could see something like this.

[It has been called to my attention that I neglected to include a disclaimer such as "This is a work of fiction. Any resemblence to any person or place is purely coincidental." Believe me: These people are all phony. The whole idea of a Human Sacrifice Channel is phony. This was written more for its sick humor value than as something to provide any enlightenment, but if you see just a glimpse of some strange truth comes through, I guess that it is all right. RS]

The camera is closing in on television news set. Behind desks are Kirk Kuddly, a blond, tanned, thirty-something man and Missy Mark, also thirty-something, similarly tanned and complected. They are the hosts of Human Sacrifices Network’s “Big Sacrifice of the Week” program. Both are wearing light blue blazers with an HSC logo on the front pocket.

KIRK: Good evening, and welcome to Sacrifice of the Week. We have something special for you this week, don’t we, Missy.

MISSY: Absolutely, Kirk. This week we are going to New Orleans for the Michael Brown hurricane avoidance sacrifice, our country’s annual American sacrifice to the hurricane gods.

KIRK: Yes, and this will be the first year that the Michael Brown Sacrifice has been back in New Orleans after spending the last dozen years in Miami. The citizens of New Orleans invested plenty in building this new Ronald Trumpet Sacritorium to replace the Superdome which the priests and priestesses had declared unfit because of its roof and, besides, was beginning to show its age and did not provide the improved sight lines and luxury boxes that the new Ronald Trumpet Plaza Sacritorium provides. Participants have been going absolutely gaga over the locker room and other accommodations, which are state of the art.

MISSY: Yes, the new retractable dome at the Ronald Trumpet Sacritorium allows for maximum comfort for observers to be out of the weather while assuring that the sacrifices will be able to go directly to the gods without a roof blocking the way.

KIRK: We will be back in a little bit with interviews with some of the aspiring sacrifices, a talk with our HSN analysts, Bob Coast and Gust Rants and Opal Windey talking to some of the crowd at the Ronald Trumpet Sacritorium as we approach this big event, but first some important messages.

[The scene changes to a bedroom. A man and a woman are laying in bed, talking. Their bodies are under the covers.]

WOMAN: Damn it, honey. You really need to see that doctor about that.

MAN: I don’t have a problem. I really don’t. It’s just that I am having too much pressure now, at work, here, everywhere. It won’t happen again. Just give me a day or two.

WOMAN: It has been every day for the last six weeks and we really need to be closer. You need to see the doctor about that erectile dysfunction. He can give you something.

MAN: But, its sooo embarrassing to talk about that kind of thing.

WOMAN: Maybe so, but it's sooo frustrating to be with somebody who has it. You really owe it to me to give it a chance and see the doctor. And remember: if the problem continues you might not be allowed to be sacrificed when your time comes. And that would be REALLY embarrassing.

[The picture dims. A female announcer is heard.]

ANNOUNCER: It’s really not that hard, guys. Especially not when you consider the alternatives. If you are having this problem, visit your doctor and ask him or her whether a prescription of Vialgro would help you. For many men, it brings them back to life.

[Singers sing jingle: “Let it grow. Get Vi-al-gro. Vi-al-gro. Your in-te-rest will show.” (repeated)]

[Kirk and Missy reappear on screen.]

KIRK: Before we go back inside the Ronald Trumpet Sacritorium, let’s go outside of it where there seems to be a protest going on. Wanda Williams is there. What’s happening, Wanda?

[Screen is split and Wanda Williams, a tall, athletic looking black woman, also thirty-something and wearing a light blue blazer with the HSN logo appears.]

WANDA: Well, these are picketers from an organization, a new one I never heard of before, called Preserve Traditional Sacrifice, or PST I guess is the acronym they are using. They are opposed to the recent vote to allow gay and lesbian priests and priestesses officiate at sacrifices. They say that they think any American chosen for sacrifice should be entitled to know that his or her sacrifice will be conducted in accordance with traditional American family values. This is Emmy Lou. She’s one of the group.

[A short, sixty-something white woman with her gray hair in a bun comes on the screen. She is overly made up and her lipstick looks garishly purple on high-definition television. Kirk and Missy disappear.]

WANDA: What has your group so excited today, Emmy Lou? They haven’t even named today’s offerings yet?

EMMY LOU: You can call me Mrs. Schaffer, ma’am. We are concerned that so many of our country’s traditions are being assaulted these days, that there seems to be a great conspiracy to abandon marriage and family and the right to raise our own children. They took prayer out of our schools and put Darwin in and they are taking away our guns and telling us that we have to be friends with the Muslims and Buddhists and gays and Japs and blacks. [pause] No offense intended, Wanda.

WANDA [almost snorting]: Well, offense was intended and taken. And it is Ms. Williams to you. Well, thank you for your comment. Back to you, Missy and Kirk.

[Kirk and Missy are back on screen. Wanda disappears.]

KIRK: Well, I guess we know where she stands. Well, Missy, the pundits are suggesting that the frontrunners this year are Jessica Mills, Tiffany Skorczeski, Bobbi Jo Johnson, Adam Everson, and the perennial candidate, Pretty Jean from California. What is your take on this?

MISSY: Well, most of the experts seem to give Bobbi Jo the best chance. She’s young from the Arkansas Ozarks and has been the runner up at several of the big sacrifices already. They won’t sacrifice Adam. They haven’t chosen a man for any major sacrifice in almost twenty years. The President asked that the men be saved for sacrifice in the war on terrorism in the Mid East and most sacrifice organizations have gone along. And as an advocate for all in our society to have equal opportunities, the lack of consideration being given to African American women in recent years does offend me and Jessica Mills is only being listed as a contender for the show and tokenism, that they don’t really intend to choose a black woman. Everybody already knows too much about Pretty Jean since she spouted off on gay marriage in front of national cameras and got kicked out of that California sacrifice.

KIRK: And that was under orders of Mr. Ronald Trumpet himself who owned that sacrifice. He forgave her once but she would not shut up.

MISSY: That’s right. A lot of people think the gods should only get our best and do not feel that Pretty Jean is one of them.

KIRK: So is Tiffany Skorczeski your pick?

MISSY: It seems to be that way. Of course, there are other contenders and sometimes they give us a surprise.

KIRK: Well, the Ronald Trumpet Sacritorium is starting to fill up. We can see that the lines to go through security are starting to back up a bit. But I understand that Rick Stanley has Pretty Jean standing by. Let’s go to him.

[Kirk and Missy disappear and the screen goes to a room under the Ronald Trumpet Sacritorium where Rick Stanley, a tall dark-haired man who looks like he is sixty trying to pass for forty is preparing to interview a blonde woman of medium height.]

RICK: We’re here with Pretty Jean who probably needs no more introduction. Pretty Jean is here trying to compete to be this year’s sacrifice to the hurricane gods. Tell me, Pretty Jean, what do you think your chances are this time? You’ve been so close so many times.

PRETTY JEAN: Well, Rick, I’m a known quantity and I have so much to offer. And my agent has been doing some research and we have found out that some of the girls here have implants. I have passed all my steroid tests and I don’t need no implants. The priestess won’t have any silicone getting in her way when she has to get her knife out and get down to business. It’s just me.

[Pretty Jean suddenly pulls her shirt up and reveals two natural breasts. The camera quickly pulls away and the technicians immediately work to make sure that they block the picture being sent during the delay period.]

RICK: Hey! Watch that, Pretty Jean. This is a family station. We could be in a lot of trouble if our technical people didn’t catch that in time. We can’t show those assets of yours to the public.

PRETTY JEAN: I’m sorry, Rick. I guess I’m just too involved and too concerned. I’ve come so close too many times and I think it is time people recognized me for the assets I have. And I hear that Rachel Clinton is going to do the sacrifice and I am an admirer of hers. And I know that she is heterosexual and would be a good choice to do the honors.

RICK: Yes, they’re bringing Rachel from her usual post at the Cotton Mather Sacritorium in Ipswitch, Massachusetts to preside over the honors today. Well, we’ll be going back to Kirk and Missy.

[The screen reverts to Kirk and Missy.]

MISSY: She sure cannot get over that homophobia, can she? But she does seem really anxious this time, almost as if this is to be her last try. She almost made us lose our license, but the enthusiasm and anxiety behind that gesture both showed.

KIRK: Yes, and what she showed us as natural looked just as good as some of the enhanced ones I’ve seen. Well, we’re just about to the interviews. Let’s take this commercial break first.

[Kirk and Missy disappear. Several scenes of groups of twenty- and thirty-something people playing volleyball, surfing, playing pick-up basketball, and playing tennis appear, mixed in with scenes of them lifting a light, foamy beverage from large clear mugs. Bottles which had contained Stiller beer are displayed, the logos clearly evident. There is music in the background The music fades and an announcer is heard.]

MALE VOICE: Yes, when you live with gusto, real gusto, you just want Stiller beer with you. Stiller beer goes so well with all your good times.

SECOND MALE VOICE, speaking quickly: Stiller beer is for people of legal age only. Please drink responsibly.

[Kirk and Missy reappear.]

KIRK: The question period is about to begin. We go now to the main stage at the Ronald Trumpet Sacritorium.

[The screen switches to a podium inside the sacritorium. Before anybody can happen, there is a quick switch to a news studio.]

NEWSCASTER: We break into this program to tell you that due to military reversals in Afghanistan that the president has called for a mass sacrifice of men for Tuesday. We will have more details later. Back to you, Kirk and Missy.

[Kirk and Missy reappear.]

MISSY: And we’ll be showing that here on HSC. Those always are crowd pleasers.

KIRK: We will return to the Ronald Trumpet Sacritorium where host Samuel Sewell is interviewing Brittany Lance, the former teen singing idol who is trying a comeback, this time as a sacrifice.

BRITTANY LANCE: . . . so I think the world will be a lot better if we can all get over these things and I hope my sacrifice will bring a good year to New Orleans and Florida and East Carolina and Albuquerque and Spokane and all of the other areas which get hurricanes.

SAM: Thank you, Brittany. And now . . .

MISSY: Opal Windey is with Peggy Sue Nelson right now. Let’s go to her.

[Screen shifts to Opal and Brittany.]

OPAL: How do you think it went, Brittany.

PEGGY SUE: [while chewing gum]: I don’t think I’ve ever been in front of so many people before. I hope it did not unnerve me too much. But I think it was pretty cool.

OPAL: You performed in front of big crowds when you were singing with the Kooltoans.

BRITTANY: Yeah, but that was a long time ago and it was something different. And I was usually so stoned that I didn’t notice it all that much.

OPAL: And now that you are clean, you think you are an acceptable candidate for sacrifice, right?

BRITTANY [popping her gum]: That’s right, Opal.


This is the end of part one. I am not certain that there will be a second part, but I do find the idea of human sacrifice as a part of show business [and civic life] interesting. RS

A weekend to note for various reasons

The Minnesota Twins spent so much time and effort to convince us and our politicians convincing us that the Humphreydome is an unfit place to play pseudobaseball that all the hoopla surrounding their leaving the place does not seem to be fitting.

But this weekend it appears that the metropolitan area will be hosting an unusually large amount of sporting activities and the Dome will be in the middle. Friday night, the Twins will be hyping their leaving the Dome by beginning their final [scheduled, regular season] series while high school football games go on elsewhere. Saturday, coterminous with the small college football games, the Golden[?] Gopher football team will make a futile [and likely unsuccessful] attempt to reclaim Paul Bunyon’s Ax at the still-new South Dakota Bank stadium and a bit later the Twins will again enter the aforementioned Humphreydome to continue to get people to pay to say good-bye to something which never should have been welcomed in the first place.

After several thousand people participate or observe the annual celebration of the victory of self-indulgence over piety Sunday morning, the Twins .will return to the Humphreydome to close out the season. [Although at this writing it is not a definite certainty that Sunday will indeed be the last pseudobaseball game the Twins play there.]

After all that celebration and hoopla, the place will be reverted to something it does a lot better and become a football studio.

The fact that the Packers will be coming in and that Bert Favre is now on the Wilf payroll has received way too much hype and does not seem worth mentioning except that perhaps thanks to that and the Twins hyping leaving the place they said they should never have gone to in the first place, the festival of self-indulgence [which began the same year that Calvin moved his team inside] has received perhaps its lowest level of fanfare and hoopla ever. Unfortunately, it won’t be enough to kill it.

Cf: http://ccmusings.blogspot.com/2007/10/self-absorption-over-piety.html

R.I.P. Guiding Light

I don’t watch the soap operas, but I know that they have been around since before television. I could not name a single character on The Guiding Light nor could I tell you where the show is set.

But I note that it is going off the air this week after more than seventy years on radio and television.

When I was a child sometimes my brother and I would be at our grandmother’s house for a morning or a day. We enjoyed our time with our grandmother, but we learned that the hour between eleven o’clock and noon was time for her “programs,” four fifteen-minute serials. One of those was The Guiding Light. My grandmother could not see well, but she sat near the television and watched all four and then took care of lunch.

I may have some sense of missing something when the show goes, although not enough to watch it disappear. I don’t even know who shows it here or when. I guess it is probably a mixture of the sentiment felt whenever old things get cashiered just for being old added to a sentiment of missing my grandmother, even though she has been gone for forty years.

It may be a reflection of one’s own aging, but you feel regret when an old friend is no longer, but sometimes, although you may not feel actual regret, you get a small twinge when anything old goes.

Leno in prime time

Jay Leno’s new show began on NBC last night. There has been a lot of ballyhoo about the network’s decision to have one hour each weeknight given to the same program. Nobody has done so for as long as anybody cares to remember. Fox doesn’t even try to program that 9 o'clock hour.

Critics seem to be panning the show. I admit that I was not especially impressed. I liked the old show, and this was like the Tonight Show with the desk gone and the sequence moved a bout, but I guess I was looking for something with more splash for a grand opening. However, considering how much money Leno made for NBC with the Tonight Show even after he found out he was going to be tossed into the Burbank landfill, it certainly seems in order that NBC give him time to develop something that works. Besides, it seems quite likely that whether the critics like the product or not that it may be a money maker. Overhead is lower for that type of program than it is for the blood and/or guts and/or tears programming that usually inhabits that hour. Networks worry about appealing to too many people past prime demographic age and/or little disposable income, i.e., people like me, but that is the demographic which is most likely to take its entertainment from broadcast television.

I think he could have done better by scratching Kanye West after the incident Sunday evening. That would have showed an attempt to not reward offensiveness, but Leno has never pretended that he is in the running for sainthood, so I don’t know that there is anything surprising that he did not.

Anyhow, it could be interesting late prime time entertainment for quite a while.

Bad advertising:

The Golden Gopher football team are opening the season with a game in the un-air-conditioned Carrier Dome in Syracuse.

Mother’s maiden name

I recently read of Sephardic Jews being discriminated against by Ashkenazim at a school by asking for [among other things] an applicant’s mother’s maiden name” on the application form.

Invidious distinction and discrimination are nothing new, folks.

We see this question frequently. It has been [and often still is] on web registrations, bank forms, job applications, and a lot of other things.

Exactly where it came from has been subject to speculation. I remember reading a few decades ago that it was devised by Boston Brahmins so that they would not find themselves hiring Irish or allowing them into their neighborhoods or clubs or whatever. A person might have what seems like a seemingly respectable English name such as “Cabot” or “Saltonstall” but you never knew whether there might not be an “O’Brien” hiding in the family tree. Later, it seems that the question helped people of Northern and Western European stock make sure that there was not a “Jaworski,” “Stephanopoulos,” “Antonelli,” or “Habib” in there.

Whatever the origin, the question does seem to have been used for that effect for many decades. [Old timers might recall it being used in a “Route 66” episode for that purpose when the heroes ran into an American “patriot” who was decrying the number of outisders [non-WASP people] infiltrating the true America.] As national origin started to become grounds on which discrimination could no longer be based and enforcement started, managers and creditors and clubmasters and others still had stacks of forms and wanted to keep using them, so they invented other rationale for having the question.

“Security” was given as one reason. This was, they said, to make sure that John Jacob Smith whose mother was named Jones was not confused with John Jacob Smith whose mother was named Johnson.

I have known the mother’s maiden name of many people, some of whom I have never met. [Quick quiz: What were the mothers’ maiden names of Presidents Franklin Delano Roosevelt, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Lyndon Baines Johnson, Richard Milhous Nixon, or George Herbert Walker Bush? It should not take a lot of guessing. And I never met any of them.]

I know the maiden names of the mothers of many people I grew up with because I knew their extended families [or at least enough about them] to figure it out and I have picked up more as I have gone along. After all, it really is not secret. And, since unfortunately, there are many cases of people trying to steal identities of people in their immediate or extended family that information serves as no protection whatever.

I have seen some suggestions on how to confound the people asking. Spell it backwards, use a grandmother’s instead, just make one up. None of these seems really secure, either because somebody else could still find it or you might forget it yourself.

A simpler suggestion: IF WE JUST QUIT ASKING THE QUESTION, WE WOULDN’T NEED ANY ANSWERS. AND IF WE ALL LEFT THE ANSWER SPACE BLANK, MAYBE WE COULD SCREW UP THE WHOLE SYSTEM.

I understand that there are probably times/places where the question may serve a valid purpose, such in official government vital statistics places.

I would be interested in hearing anybody else’s history with this question.

Notes on No. 756 plus two years

Two years ago today Barry Bonds hit home run number 756.

Has it only been two years? It seems that both the game and society have moved so much past him so quickly.

Selig and the MLB honchos made good money on the home run derbies of the late 20^th and early 21^st century and then became so righteous as more news of steroids and perhaps juiced balls became more common.

Now the writers who used the stories to keep baseball in the news and beat writers and commentators employed will arrange to keep him away from Cooperstown forever (or at least a long time).

While some of these people want to put Pete Rose there, a man who bet on a team he was managing, they get so outraged about a man who cheated only in order to improve performance. They even seem to keep putting pressure on the Commissioner’s office to re-admit Rose even though it is Cooperstown’s rule, not MLB’s rule which keeps Rose out.

They will probably win on the Rose matter sooner or later.

And maybe the relative quiet with which Bonds and number 756 have disappeared from our consciousness is a good sign that his feat was ephemeral and had only of momentary significance derived from his perceived, non-sanctioned (at least officially) use of steroids is really in order.

Lizie Borden took an ax

Today, August 4, is the anniversary of the death of Lizzie Borden’s father and step-mother. [If you have never heard of the incident – and I didn’t until I was grown – and have missed the resultant doggerel (below), it was big news in 1892.]

In the mid-1990s I heard a similar piece of doggerel (also below) about a Mr. O. J. Simpson who was also accused and later acquitted of a highly-publicized double murder.

Both of these bits of verse have historical errors [e.g, there is no proof of the death order of the Bordens and it was never confirmed that there was anything other than a eater-waiter relationship between O.J.’s ex and Ronald Goldman] and the latter does not seem to have lasted in the public memory, but likely the memory of the crimes for which both were acquitted will linger for some time.

Lizzie Borden took an axe

And gave her mother forty whacks.

When she saw what she had done

She gave her father forty-one

O.J. Simpson took a knife

And hacked away his ex-wife’s life

When he saw what he could do

He butchered up her boyfriend too.

Jane Hathaway obit

Jane Hathaway, foundation director, condor advocate,
figured in Commerce Bank scandal

LOS ANGELES [October 18. 1998]

Jane Hathaway, the bank secretary at Beverly Hills’ Commerce Bank who first came to public attention by testifying against and helping convict her boss in the 1972 California Dream banking scandal, died in a Los Angeles nursing home Sunday of complications from cancer at the age of 71.

Hathaway helped convict her long-time boss Milburn Drysdale after his California Dream Landscapes Finance Company and related ventures were revealed as little more than a complicated Ponzi scheme based on fraudulent premises which Drysdale and associates helped devise. She later became an advocate for preserving the California condor also twice sought election as a Republican to the California Assembly.

She was originally a co-defendant with Drysdale, but her attorneys were able to obtain separate trials and won her acquittal. The testimony revealed in her trial helped lead to more charges against Drysdale who was eventually convicted of 27 charges and sentenced to 45 years in prison. Drysdale died at the federal prison in Leavenworth, Kansas in 1977.

After unsuccessful campaigns for the California legislature in 1976 and 1978, Hathaway went to work in 1980 as Executive Director for the Daisy Moses Foundation, which had been founded by J. D. Clampett, the oil mogul who was Drysdale’s primary victim. Clampett, who lost an estimated $30 million and control of Mammoth Pictures as a result of Drysdale’s crimes, had said he never believed Hathaway guilty at all and paid for her “dream team” defense. Hathaway left the Moses Foundation in 1988 to become director of Biddle Bird Watchers Society. Elly May Clampett, J. D. Clampett’s daughter and granddaughter of Daisy Moses, replaced her at the Moses Foundation.

She met the late P. Casper Biddle, the famed condor advocate and founder of Biddle Bird Watchers in the early 1960’s and became a devoted follower. She left the Biddle Bird Watchers after events following Biddle’s 1993 death led to the dissolution of the Biddle Society.

“If it weren’t for such devoted people as Professor Biddle and Jane Hathaway,” there wouldn’t be any condors left here,” said state senator Diane Kong, frequently described as the legislature’s leading condor advocate. ‘That woman was amazing. She should have been a professional lobbyist.”

“She was the nicest and most helpful person I met in California,” Clampett said from his retirement home in Tennessee. I would have never known what that man [Drysdale] was doing to me if it hadn’t been for her and she stopped things before I was wiped out.”

Services are pending. Golden West Funeral Home in Beverly Hills is handling the arrangements.

Another look at that "natural born" thing again

I have been reading the Constitution of the United States of America since at least when I was in junior high school. I read MacBeth in high school and that was almost as long ago. I imagine that most of the writers of the Constitution had read Shakespeare’s story of the ambitious Scottish king whose story the play purports to tell.

I don’t know why I did not notice until this week an obvious possible constitutional conflict for some people who might wish to be our nation’s head of state.

Our constitution specifically mentions that the president be a “natural born citizen.” The crazy rightists who complain about Obama’s missing birth certificate won’t quit their railing about the president’s alleged foreign birth and the governmental officials in Hawaii who back in 1961 rigged the record so that a baby of mixed-race history could run for president when he grew up.

I don’t participate in that view of conspiracy. But just this week those words “natural born” have just hit me with a different light.

I am advancing the hypothesis that this rules out any person, male or female of any race or birthplace, who was born by Caesarian section.

But MacBeth made it clear that people exposed to British culture [such as the one we were seeking to replace here] knew the distinction between being born of woman and being plucked out of same.

I don’t know my history well enough to know if any of our previous presidents were born that way or not and question whether anybody would be able to document anybody’s status this way, certainly not without infringing upon somebody’s medical records, but this ought to give conspiracy people of another age something to work with.

Ramirez, greater than Mantle?

Manny Ramirez has passed Mickey Mantle on the MLB all-time home run list.

People who follow baseball people continually argue about the value of statistics of one era vs. those of another. If you have ever discussed the game with me you have probably heard some rambles on the theme.

It is the contrast between Ramirez and Mantle which amazes me, specifically the way they treated their bodies.

Mickey Mantle was an old timer who did not treat his body well. Ever since late in his career, people have speculated how many he could have hit had he taken care of himself and better watched what he put in his body.

Manny Ramirez is from the newer age. He is not putting things in his body which he thinks will have a detrimental effect on his career or maybe even his teammates. On the contrary, he was recently suspended for what he put into his body to improve his career.

If I had a son I don’t know that I would want him to grow up to be like either of them.

Mary Jo Kopechne, 1940-1969

Mary Jo Kopechne died forty years ago this weekend. Nobody seems to be noting this. Yes, I know there are other things going on -- health care, Cronkite, Apollo 11.

Ted Kennedy is no longer a pro-life U.S. Senator, but he is still in office.

Sexual harassment is still a problem.

We just never get around to looking at all the stories.

Walter Cronkite

Walter Cronkite is dead.

I have to agree that his passing does have to mark something. I recollect seeing him on the television when I was a kid. We usually were eating when the CBS evening news was on and not watching the sin box, but when we did watch a network newscast, his was the one we saw.

All the major media are playing the story, CBS the most. But if I hear the “most trusted man in America” again I think I might reel. Cronkite was good, but I don’t know that he was that especially trustworthy.

And in the middle of all this, we need to remember that even CBS was not always supportive of Cronkite. In 1964 they had him anchor the Republican convention in Daly City, California, but dumped him from the booth for the Democratic convention in Atlantic City the next month. [I remember hearing a rumor that summer that CBS was going to make Cronkite the president of another venture they were acquiring, the New York Yankees. I never heard more of that. That was before the internet made all rumors truth and if not eternal truth, perpetual truth of some kind.]

I overheard it in a store last night that Cronkite had gone on to get an interview with a certain well-known pedophile who recently died. But as much coverage as his passage is getting, it will never catch up with what that guy got.

ferrous faucets

Farrah ‘Fawcett died a few days ago. It was bad timing for her that just as the news of her passing was starting to get national circulation that a pedophile who was more famous, it seems, died whose death eclipsed hers.

But I did start to remember some of what I had known of Ms. Fawcett from her heyday of three decades ago.

And I remember seeing a picture in a newspaper of an old guy holding some plumbing fixtures that he was selling as “ferrous faucets.” Some were labeled “cold.” Others were labeled “hot.” It seemed that Ms. Fawcett [or her attorneys] wanted him to quit selling them since they felt that he was infringing upon

I don’t remember that I ever heard he disposition of the case, but I remember thinking that if Ms. Fawcett prevailed that a former Detroit Tiger outfielder should have a good time taking on the battery companies for their “alkaline” batteries.

Media values -- RIP division

A noted pedophile died Wednesday. He would probably want his name mentioned.

I’m not sure that anybody else who never held public office whose passing has been given more hoopla by the various medis since Mother Teresa.

And to make that comparison seems almost sacrilegious.

Now what will be written when that film director/ clarinetist who married his girlfriend's daughter goes?

Forgive us our debts, but you pay yours

A Monticello debt-collection agency is facing a federal law suit because it sends out notices with a “WWJD” header.

And every Sunday we say “forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.”

Story

Advertising in our era

I guess I will never understand the world of marketing.

We hear it said that a good salesperson could sell refrigerators to Eskimos or carburetors to Amish. After all, sometimes you have to create the demand before you can sell it.

And it helps sometimes when you know where and to whom you are advertising. Several years ago a commercial for feminine hygiene product somehow got slipped into [I believe] a Cubs game on WGN. I wondered whether they knew something about who watches ball games that I didn’t. But since I never saw that repeated I assumed that it was some kind of aberration.

But this has been happening repeatedly. Have you noticed the commercials lately for genuine California milk?

These commercials are being aired in Minnesota and Wisconsin, for crying out loud. What are they thinking?

Fifty years ago Charles Starkweather was executed

Today is the fiftieth anniversary of the execution of Charles Starkweather. Together with his girlfriend [as I remember there was some dispute between about how much each of them did] they killed eleven people, including her parents and baby sister.

I remember seeing a picture of him and his girlfriend on television during the brief period between when they were identified and fled Omaha and when they were apprehended in Wyoming. The announcement was very curt, something like, ”If you see these people, get away from them and call the police. They’re killers.” There seemed to be a special emphasis on that last word.
[When I first heard on the radio that they had been caught, I remember thinking it was Wyoming, Iowa, but it was the state of Wyoming.]

I remember reading an article attributed to him in a Sunday paper sometime between his sentencing and execution, in the Parade magazine I think. He said he had been picked on all of his life, that other kids had belittled his red hair, calling him “red-headed woodpecker.” He also indicated that he had come to Jesus since his arrest.

I don’t know if these statements were intended to get him some clemency, but it wasn’t about to come. Capital punishment seemed to be more accepted back then, even if it was not always advocated and even if somehow Nebraska could overlook the severity and the ruthlessness of what he had done, Wyoming would also have had an opportunity to get him.

Starkweather’s feats and his fate were the things which kept boys my age talking back in those days. Nebraska took his life with an electric chair and we would joke about his “hot seat” and watching where we sat for what seems like several weeks after that.

Starkweather’s crimes were especially cruel and grizzly and were stretched out over several weeks and I don’t know that we appreciated the utter evil of what he did, the utter cold-bloodedness of it all as we laughed about it.

In my adult life I have come to oppose capital punishment for more than one reason, but you do have to wonder just what could have ever been done with a boy like this. And I cannot help but notice how much more quickly sentence was carried out than it ever could be carried out these days.

Additional note: His girlfriend got off with a life sentence and was paroled several years ago.

More can be found at
http://www.crimezzz.net/serialkillers/S/STARKWEATHER_charles_FUGATE.php

TV Obit -- Otis Campbell

I have accumulated a few fake obituarties of people associated with past television series. Some will show up here.

Otis Campbell, motivational speaker

RALEIGH, North Carolina [June 23, 1998]

Otis Campbell, the well known self-help guru from the 1970’s and 1980’s died at his home in Raleigh June 22. Campbell had been known to have emphysema and was believed to be in his mid-70’s.

Campbell, who captivated a generation of baby boomers disaffected with what he disdainfully called the “3C’s Society” referring to chemicals, change, and complaints with his “You can’t smell how great it is at the top until you’ve gotten rid of your own stink” lecture series, had recently retired. His publicist, Lisa Diesel, said that he died of complications of emphysema.

Admitting that he had been the “town drunk of Mayberry [North Carolina],” Campbell used illustrations from his own days of addictions and his subsequent recovery into a career as a successful ice cream distributor in his speeches. His lecture stops were noted for the distribution of his “Coming Clean” ice cream. The packaging contained inspirational messages.

Famed Metropolitan Opera singer Gomer Pyle, a friend of Campbell’s from his Mayberry days, often appeared with him on his speaking tours. He had seen Campbell as recently as Tuesday and told reporters today that Campbell’s passing was “regrettable.”

Pyle said that Campbell “could have done so much more for others if he had had more time,” but also noted that Campbell acknowledged that lack of time was one of his shortcomings, always noting that recovering addicts still bore the responsibility for the results of their bad habits and adapt to the limits they had already put on themselves.

“His message differed from some motivational speakers. He knew that he could not escape the consequences for any of the things he done earlier. He felt instead that it was more important to work for as wonderful future as one had the ability to make,” Pyle noted.

Campbell, a widower twice, is survived by a brother, nieces, nephews, and cousins. Funeral arrangements were not immediately announced.