Old picture of young girl

 

I bought this picture at a tag sale; I have no idea who she is, but judging by her hairstyle she was photographed in the Roaring Twenties, when girls first started "bobbing" their hair. I think she's lovely, particularly her hands. It's sad that no-one from the family wanted her picture.

A tag sale of somebody's belongings tells you a lot about what their lives were like. This family reminds me of my Uncle Doc and his wife--the same sterling silver, linens, petit point, and crochet. You just know that Mrs. Tag had her women friends over for tea and cards. She probably served little cucumber sandwiches and tarts filled with cream, along with tea poured from her sterling silver teapot into her bone china cups. Her silver sugar tongs were used to serve lumps of sugar. The fingertip towels in the guest bathroom were made of real linen stiffened with starch. Her husband was probably a doctor, and they attended dances at the country club where they played golf with their friends.

My aunt and uncle were the Jewish equivalent of this Roman Catholic couple. They just went to different country clubs and celebrated different holidays. My aunt actually had a room--a small one--filled with shelves to house her sterling silver belongings. Of course the household help polished the silver.

Nowadays these sterling silver teasets are in thrift shops and antique stores. The good ones are valuable, because of the workmanship and the value of the silver, but silver-plated ones are available cheaply at the Good Will. No one wants to polish this stuff any more. The women who would have been hostesses are doctors themselves nowadays, or lawyers. Or they work in "development." All my female cousins work in "development" nowadays and instead of hosting teas with rich buttery desserts they are spending their few spare hours working out.

Here's me

in a building that had just recently been built,at Ohio University, in Athens Ohio, which they are now tearing down because it's falling apart! True!

No-one has quite succeeded in tearing me down yet, though.

Is anyone surprised that Tony Hayward was "replaced"?

Anyone?

BP chairman Carl-Henric Svanberg said that Hayward would step aside from daily involvement in BP's oil spill response.

Let's admit that Hayward is as guilty as Osama bin Laden and works for a big, evil, capitalist foreign entity.  he has been told that he is liable to criminal prosecution.  Why must he be publicly shamed?  What purpose is served by putting him through an auto de fe on the floor of Congress?  Not the purpose of getting at the truth.  It's to allow Congressmen to swan around, get their self-righteous on, and get their ugly faces on camera.

It's humiliating to me, as an American, to have these disgusting public servants posing and preening for all the world like the prosecutors of Law and Order.  I have no doubt they are all crooks.  Obama too, the big tough Chicago bully.  His behavior is nauseating and not befitting the dignity of his office.

Peter DeVries once said that he had been taught in church to believe in the omnipotence and omniscience of God and the total depravity of man, and he still believed in one of those things.  Me too.

True...

but politically disastrous.

Today is the anniversary...

of the Battle of Bunker Hill: June 17, 1775.

The United States government takes over a foreign company

Why not?

Having cut their teeth on American automobile manufacturing and banks, whet their appetites taking over health care, the Chicago Gang found it the work of a moment to blackmail BP (which Obama persists in calling British Petroleum even though they have changed their corporate name)into setting up a trust fund. It used to be called extortion but is now known as The Chicago Way.

If only they could be as tough as that with Iran!

The British Constitution

in a nutshell.

I've always loved Great Britain, the land of Shakespeare, P G Wodehouse, Winston Churchill, Jane Austen, and--don't laugh--Mary Poppins.  As a child, I loved to read books about English children who had crumpets for tea and celebrated Guy Fawkes Day.  I have no trouble adopting the Pilgrims and Puritans as ancestors even though they didn't grow up in Pinsk.

The United States would never have developed as it did and become the country it now is without its British heritage. Our Constitution grew out of theirs.

Since Mr Charm has a PhD in British History, I knew  the British had a constitution, albeit an "unwritten" one.   But this post clarifies the British Constitution and I found it interesting.  I also liked the idea that the oak tree, the national tree, symbolizes the British Constitution.

Read the whole thing. It's admirably clear.

Getting the shingles vaccine

My father had shingles recently.  It was very painful, so he recommended that I (and everyone else who had had chicken pox) get the vaccine.

I'm not going to recount the hassles that I underwent, except to mention that I got advice from both my private insurer and Medicare that was contradictory.  I finally got the shot, which I paid for myself and then struggled to get reimbursed.  This was two years ago, and provided a foretaste of what Obamacare has in store for us.

Now I am trying to get an infusion of Reclast, having found out that women with osteoporosis in their hips, which I have, should either get preventive treatment or start picking out something becoming to wear at the funeral.  Because, apparently if you break your hip all that remains is to choose a casket and line up pallbearers.

The local hospital offers these infusions, but refuses to administer them except under a maze of stringent rules and restrictions which make it almost impossible to actually get the drug.

Medicare can't decide whether Part B or Part D covers these infusions, and doesn't care, preferring that patients break their hips and die so they can streamline their patient lists.

I would like to fight this monster, but it has so many tentacles that I don't know which one to tackle first.

Welcome to reality

The job situation hits new graduates hard.

Blue vase

 

The fat kid in the family

If you lined me and my cousins up in a row, we would look like this:  1110111.  The round shape in the middle is me.  at 5'2" and 116 lbs, I was the fat kid.  Since that day, I have expanded my franchise, so to speak.

When I was a kid, I looked like a craft project made of pipe cleaners.  Then at the age of about 11, just when you need a boost, I developed a little round stomach.  I could guess what was in store for me by looking at mother and bubbe, both of whom were rotund and getting rotunder.  I  believed and did not want to believe that rotundity was inevitable. Everyone in the family helpfully suggested that I would look really great if I lost (choose one:) 5/10/15 lbs.

I fought the good fight for a long time.  Diet, exercise.  Exercise, diet.  No fat, no carbs, walk fast, walk slow, lift heavy/light weights two/four days a week.  Still, the numbers on the scale kept inching up.

I am not alone.  Everyone I know is on a diet.  And all these dieters are agreed that despite really cutting calories they are really not hungry.


For me, however, I find that when I am on a diet I really am hungry.  Very hungry.  Waking up in the middle of the night with gnawing hunger pains type hungry.  Starving.  Every day on a diet is a potential Yom Kippur.

Now here's the tough part.  I could totally forget about diets and be comfortable just as I am, except that I don't stay as I am without watching what I eat, I just get fatter.

Heredity sure is a bitch.

Obama to Netanyahu: drop dead!

Smart diplomacy.

Ill wind

We have been having some really nasty weather.  Hot, humid, sultry, with an unhelpful wind that doesn't blow anything good, but supposedly foreshadows a storm.  It's a wind that so far as I know doesn't have a name, like a mistral or Santa Ana, but should.

My plants look like they've died of heat exhaustion, and no wonder.  I can almost see them panting for water.  I'm thirsty myself.

I wish  the storm would come, but when it does, we will probably have another power outage.  We had one earlier in the week, and were just comfortably settled down with our candles and flashlights to do a bit of grumbling when the power came back on.

Not forgotten

D-Day, the start of the liberation of Europe, 66 years ago.

Helen Thomas, lovable bigot

The ethnic background that dare not speak its name.

Nowhere in the controversy concerning Helen Thomas is her ethnic origin mentioned. She's not Welsh, like Dylan Thomas, she's not Jewish, like Michael Tilson Thomas.

She is what Tim Blair calls a Presbyterian.

If a Jew suggested that the Palestinians need to go back to Egypt, from whence they came, I'd hate to hear the ruckus.

Breaking news from 1972

Good grief! Nixon was as bad as George W Bush.

or maybe not.

Ironically for that administration, the crew seemed to have concerns about making sure such job offers were legal. A handwritten note penned in the corner of the memo notes, “Malek: This must be fully approved by AG before any action is taken.”

That's pretty ironic, all right.

News that's unfit to print

Down the memory hole.

Dancing

 

This makes me so angry!

Red light cameras are taking over Delaware.

There are red-light enforcement cameras at 47 intersections in Delaware, and the state is adding 10 more cameras this spring. The first cameras were installed in 2001 in Wilmington. In 2009, the cameras caught about 61,000 violations and generated more than $5 million in fines. The number of violations has dropped in recent years, and DelDOT says the cameras have led to a 15 percent decrease in accidents at intersections covered by red-light cameras.

I don't believe accidents have been reduced. That's bull****. This is nothing more than a scheme to shake money out of the pockets of Delaware residents. If I had wanted to pay more in unreasonable charges I could have stayed in New Jersey.

What I want to know is, what's the total take, and how do they split their ill-gotten revenues with the company that provides the cameras? I hear it's fifty-fifty. Oh yes, and is this "provider" a local business, or foreign?

And can citizens plead not guilty and have their cases heard, and possibly reversed, in court? Or is there an automatic presumption of guilt?

Flotilla megillah

Question:

[T]here is a lot of noise of how this raid was especially outrageous since a "Nobel laureate" and a "famous writer "were travelling on one of the ships; how exactly should that give a ship immunity from boarding?

Simple: famous people are much, much more important than clods like you and me. Famous people should be treated much, much better.