From the shelves of the Good Will store

vaguely (but not quite) obscene object of no utility

Other stuff anyone could easily live without

Candleholder and son, possiblly another candleholder

Another view of weird candleholder

Your money or your life?

I wrote this some time ago:

I used to drive a small car. I laughed when I passed a gas station (well, it was more like a quiet chuckle). Then my small car, going about 5 mph, was hit by a mid-size Lexus. Score: Lexus 1, Miriam 0.

They practically had to vacuum my car off the road, it was in so many pieces.

I escaped without a scratch, miraculously.

But I'm not driving a really small car, unless it is up-armored.


An intelligent comment:

Nobody in the USA will "clamor" about fuel efficient cars. People can always buy what they want ... at least, up to now.

They will simply decide on the compromise they are willing to make between the well documented lethality of tiny cars and the cost of gas.

The cost of gas vs. the value of your life.  

 Choose one.

The guy has a point.

Another good reason to hate Mel Gibson

As if I needed one.

He's just another one of those Christians who love their fellow man.

Christopher Hitchens has cancer

It's a shame.  I hope he's one of the lucky five percent who survive.  May he have the best of care, he deserves it.

I just finished Hitch's book, which I enjoyed very much.  He seems like a generous-hearted man and a good friend, a guy you wouldn't mind going out drinking with.  His aversions are as strong as his likes, and as vehemently held.   Most people espouse a party line and don't think for themselves if they can help it.  So it's kind of refreshing to find someone who has it in for Mother Theresa.

Hitch has had an enviable life, so far, and I hope will continue to do so.  He  appears to know everyone I've ever heard of, or at least everyone whose books I have ever read, including--and this impressed me--Redmond O'Hanlon.  I thought i had discovered Redmond O'Hanlon all by myself, there in the travel sectiion of the library, and here Hitchens knew him right along.

Some religious persons have suggested that this cancer is God's punishment for Hitchens' vigorous atheism.  Whatever religion these people profess, I want none of it.  I am dubious about belief, and dubious about prayer, but I still will send a few thoughts of Christopher Hitchens, who has given me so much pleasure, winging heavenwards.  God can then do exactly as He likes, if he exists.  And if he doesn't, no harm done.

Supreme Court nominee hearing

Senate snoozes.

Kagan is going to be confirmed.  It's all about the numbers.  Kagan is a nonentity, unlike Justice Scalia, who is really brilliant.  She is one of the better Obama candidates, in that she never made bombs in the basement or gave speeches praising Mao's little red book. Yet.

We have 300,000 million people in this country, and lots of them are boring Harvard graduates.  They learned the Harvard game--the admissions game, I mean--in middle school, and were careful to do what it took to get into Harvard:  raise money for cerebral palsy, run half-marathons, volunteer for the school paper, play the cello, and visit old ladies in nursing homes twice a week, while getting good grades and kissing up to the teachers.

I can't imagine she has ever held an opinion that would differ in any respect from that of the faculty and administration at Harvard, Mayor Bloomberg, Mario Cuomo, Mayor Daley (the son, not the father) or Obama himself.

His nominees, except for the lunatic fringe ones who want to give carrots and rutabagas the vote or emulate Cuban health care, are ticket punchers.  They look different, but at heart they resemble Chiclets.  So she's fifty.  Another thirty or forty years on the Supreme Court bench and she'll retire and leave an opening for another just like herself.

Happy Independence Day

My younger daughter sitting on a cannon at Fort Ticonderoga, where we beat the British in 1775.

Rev Wright uses bad grammar

even though he knows better.

"White folk done took this country," Wright said. "You're in their home, and they're gonna let you know it."

He had a good education.  His father was a clergyman and his mother a school principal.  I bet they didn't talk like that around the family dinner table.

I knew it couldn't just be me!

Dell had computer problems, and I had Dell problems.

In the past five years, we have had serious problems with two Dell computers.  The latest one, after a year of use during which it never worked properly, had a defective motherboard.

I figured it was something to do with me, considering how little I know about computers.  The only thing I actually know about them is:  I need one!

You know how, when you take your car in for service, the mechanic tells you the flugelhorn is defective and the rubella needs a new part, and you try to nod sagely like you understand what he is talking about?  I have the same lack of understanding the most elementary facts about computers.  However, most cars work.

Now imagine you purchase a new car, which is fine but has four perfectly square wheels.  But you are told it's fine.  It's supposed to work that way.

Makes you crazy, doesn't it?  The hell with you, Dell, including all the supercilious Indian male-supremicist outsource guys with ununderstandable accents.  Bad cess to you!

Mother and Dad, High Street, Columbus, OH

This is the earliest picture I have of my parents together. He is wearing spats. Yes, spats! On a warm summer day in the Midwest, a man is wearing a jacket and tie and a woman is wearing a light summer dress. Neither is wearing a T-shirt which says FCUK, or for that matter, anything else. And yet they are smiling!

You go, U S ambassador to Australia!

How did this guy ever get appointed?

Tracking a missing library book

or paying a "restocking" fee.

I, too, use more than one library, and sometimes return books to the wrong library.  The fees can really mount up.

When I worked in the library I always told the pages, who were temporary minimum wage high school students, that they were the most important employees in the library.  Pages put the books away, and a book put away in the wrong place is a book which for all practical purposes has ceased to exist.  Inter-library cooperation with shared databases has helped the situation greatly, but does not benefit the person who needs the only copy today, for instance for a report due tomorrow.  This happens more often than you would think.  For instance, with summer reading assignments.  The week before school begins in the fall there is not a copy of any of the books on the list to be found within 10 miles, either in libraries or in bookstores.  The kids who think ahead take them out of the library on the first day of vacation and then take the book on vacation with them, generally leaving it somewhere.  It falls into the lake, is buried in the sand of the beach, or left in a hotel room.

Meanwhile, libraries get tough on people who don't play the library game.  The library game has two moves:  1) check out a book or books; 2) return it or them in a timely fashion.  I have mastered move 1, but have trouble with move 2.   A large part of my motive for using the library is to avoid having any more books take up permanent residence in my home, which is groaning with books.  They have overflowed their shelves, filled the nightstands, piled up on tables and counters, moved into boxes stowed in strategic locations, and now reside in piles on the floor, their last redoubt.  So why don't I return library books in good time, like a decent citizen?

There are root causes for this, as for other forms of crime.  I used to work in libraries, you see, and everyone who works in libraries has at least 50 outstanding overdue books.  That's because we are fine-exempt.  If a book really gets lost at home--I'm talking years, here--we insiders remove it from the database, eventually.

But we get tough on ordinary citizens who don't return their books, and charge them restocking fees.  Someone has to obey the laws, you know.

However, pages being temporary and poorly paid high school students, they sometimes misplace books, so I would check the shelves if someone were going to charge me $100 for a lost book.

Death of a food critic

Egon Ronay, 94

My favorite quote:

He inspected airports, motorway service stations, hospitals, schools and park cafés on behalf of the ordinary public, for whom his round blue seals of approval, stuck on a window or a door, soon became a sine qua non of dining. He found Lyons Corner Houses very acceptable. To check transport cafés he would even don an anorak and cap, while the Rolls was parked around the corner. 

So how's all that pork working out for you, West Virginia?

I've always had a great fondness for West Virginia. A large percentage of mother's clients came from there to work in Columbus's factories, and while in Columbus, they often got in trouble, with the law, with their wives, and with other West Virginians in rundown bars, which we called beer joints. That's where mother came in. My uncle claimed that there was a tunnel leading from West Virginia straight to mother's office.

You'd never want to meet nicer, more open-hearted people. Though poor, they would give you the shirts off their backs. And they adored mother. Another point in favor of the state was that, when Virginia seceded from the Union, West Virginia seceded from Virginia. Take that, you aristocratic slave-holding planters!

Byrd was well known for bringing home the pork. Does that mean West Virginia was prosperous? Did he leave the place better than he found it?

Hell no!

West Virginia's relative median household income is 51! among the 50 states. I don't know whether this proves that Obama was onto something when he talked about visiting all 57 states.

It's tied with Arkansas at #5 among the states for poverty.

So all West Virginia has to show for his efforts is a bunch of federal buildings, highways, etc, named after the old dodderer, and the occasional statue of him.

Colonial Soldiers were better shots than the British

despite rumors to the contrary.

Exquisite ignorance

Your public education dollars at work.

Someone please buy this young lady a map of the United States.

Mother as a young woman

 

Note the stylish shoes. She was vain about her slim legs and tiny feet.

Mother and the camera

 

I had lunch with a cousin the other day, someone who had been very fond of mother, and she inquired whether I had a picture of mother. I have very few, and this is for a reason: she immediately tore up any and all pictures of her. I have a picture of a little girl with one arm--the little girl was me and the other arm was around mother and subsequently sacrificed to the Gods of Not Getting Your Picture Taken Looking Fat.

She also refused to be seen in a bathing suit, and then to try on a bathing suit, and then to go swimming altogether, although she loved to swim and was good at it. Thus she denied herself a pleasure which would have been good for her health and maybe helped her to slim down.

I am beginning to see this as a manifestation of family wackiness. The aforementioned cousin had a salad without dressing and four cups of coffee for lunch. Another cousin regularly eats a can of sardines for lunch. A third cousin met me for breakfast and had an English muffin without anything on it. I would as soon eat the box the muffin came in.

Being fat is a sin for which you must be punished by going hungry. That seems to be the reasoning. I have another theory. I think weight gain for some people is like the gusher in the gulf. Do nothing, and the oil will continue to spill and the fat accumulate. Heroic measures are required to contain the oil and curb the appetite.

I used to believe that Americans were physically slothful and that if they got up off their butts the butts would get up off them. My visit to Dublin cured me of that belief. Our bed and breakfast alndlady, Mrs. Marr, ran up and down the steps of her establishment all day every day, making beds, bring things up, taking things down, dusting, cleaning, cooking, laundering, yet she was a large woman, at least 180 lbs at 5'6. If exercise didn't keep her slim, it wouldn't work for me.

Young man in picture frame

This young man was hidden in a picture frame I bought at the same tag sale where I bought the photo of the young girl. I can't date his picture as accurately as I can hers because men's clothing styles don't change like women's do, so his picture could have been taken any time.

I fancy the two have a family resemblance, but that may just be my overactive imagination. Anyway, his picture was turned face inward within a picture frame and I only discovered it when I took the picture out to insert one of my paintings.

I must make a mental note to leave all my photographs to a library if I don't want strangers buying them or worse, discarding them.

The war against beige

There was a newspaper article in the local paper about a stylish young lady. I was unable to download it, due to some mysterious software weirdness.   Unfortunately, I only wanted to use her photo as a horrible example.  She was dressed completely in beige.  There should be rules about this.  Beige suits hardly any woman.  Particularly if you have beige hair and skin and pale eyes, you look like you are trying to disappear into the walls.  It's not that becoming to black women either, although they can get away with it better.  But why try?  Beige is boring, at best.  Even navy blue is better than beige.

Let's stamp out beige clothing.

Another old picture--mother with a friend