Happy 50th Bill!

While the neighborhood we live in has it’s share of crime, except for an incident of graffiti on our garage year ago and being help up about 4 blocks from home (also years ago and a reason I haven’t gotten jury duty over the past 6 years), we have been rather lucky. Bill did report one weekend I was away that he was watching tv and someone was turning the front doorknob, but except for the incidents mentioned. . .

There was trouble with landscaping plant destruction caused by a group of kids who gathered at the house next door (while they lived there, the best summer we had was when the neighbor’s son, a young teenager, seemed to be in some juvenile detention). I think they gathered there because the parents were extremely lax (one neighbor told me that when the boys set a dumpster on fire, the father drove them away so they wouldn’t be there when the police arrived. This was the same father who one Sunday when I was up earlier than usual was coming up my walk, reaching down for my home-delivered newspaper just when I suddenly opened the door—he claimed he was going to bring it to me but since our door only has small windows at the top and it isn’t possible to see through them, suspicious person that I am, I doubted his statement).

Our oldest dog Schubert, back in his younger days, did cause someone trying to break into a neighbor’s tool shed to give up. I had taken him outside before leaving for work and he noticed a stranger in the fenced back yard next door and started barking, I went in and called the police, but by the time they had arrived, Schubert’s noisy warning had alerted the intruder and he had fled.

This all leads to last night, when we had the cats at the vets for treatment of respiratory infections. Schubert, who is much older and in stable but fragile health, requires a special prescription diet. We purchase the canned kidney-friendly food the vets. I bought two cans and we paid for the cats’ treatment and left. Arriving home, Bill carried the larger pet carrying case (a two-handed job) and I carried the two cans of dog food and the smaller case. I had the keys to unlock the front door so, after entering the enclosed porch, I placed the cans on a pillar and unlocked the door so we could release the cats into their house.

This morning when I went to feed the dogs I remembered the cans on the porch but they were gone. Someone had spotted the cans, came in the screen door and took them. I hope at least the specialty food will help someone’s dog’s kidneys.

I also guess we have to put a lock on the screen door and remember to not leave anything on the porch.

But this all leads me to the Gates/Crowley/Obama issue over the Gates arrest in Cambridge. A lot has been said, and who called the police "nosy." I would hope that if two men were trying to push open our front door, some neighbor would call the police.

A lot of attention has been paid to Sarah Palin and her rambling resignation. Comments range from rumors of another ethics issue, to a first step for a 2012 run, to calling her a quitter who can't finish a task, to a New York Times editorial saying that if Obama represents meritocracy and the ivy league as a stepping stone to power, Palin represents democracy and the idea that the common (wo)man can achieve success without those trappings. My only issue with that is that her showing of knowledge of political matters is not evidence of a thoughtful study of those issues, but an emotional response.

I don't know what person used the Obamafication site available on the Web to create the image I included with this post, but I want to thank them, it expresses just how I feel about someone good at manipulating people for political gain without really understanding the need for statesmanship in leading.

Hung

This week’s New Yorker has a review about the new HBO series of my title’s title, created by husband-and-wife team of Dmitry Lipkin and Colette Burson, who also wrote three of the first four episodes and are executive producers.
Nancy Franklin, the reviewer, concludes: “It’s not yet possible to tell where ‘Hung’ is going—I’ve seen four episodes out of the season’s ten—but at this point it reminds me a little too much, in tone and substance, of a couple of recent high-concept cable series, in which characters, with an ease that is supposed to strike us as questionable and yet understandable, cross the line between legal and illegal, making us ask ourselves whether the line is in the right place. You’ve got Showtime’s ‘Weeds,’ in which a respectable adult turns to drug dealing. You’ve got AMC’s ‘Breaking Bad,’ in which a high-school teacher turns to drugmaking. And you’ve got Showtime’s ‘Dexter’ (a forensics expert who’s also a serial killer) and Showtime’s ‘Nurse Jackie’ (a drug-addicted R.N. who steals pills from the hospital pharmacy and uses while on duty). ‘Hung’ is timely, but strangely superficial. It doesn’t really examine the American dream; it just tickles it.”
This got me to thinking about that legal/illegal line and the way things are now. A TV show about crossing the line is sort of light weight in timew when financial institutions used the rewriting of what was legal (with deregulation) to achieve what is often thought of when you hear the words “the American dream” -- getting rich. Of course you still have people like Madoff who use the old-fashioned, illegal methods, too. And that is where we get to the American passion for outlaws [although I wonder if it is a sexist infatuation, we seem taken with “bad boys” but ” (the phrase only calls to mind a Donna Summer song) except for a few “bad girls” – a character on another HBO show, Brenda on “Six Feet Under” and her sex-compulsion is the only one I can come up with quickly – women outlaws are not as featured/exploited to create the romance].
I recalled the New Yorker review when I read Frank Rich today in the NY Times: his take on the financial crisis, Bernie Madoff, Wall Street and “Public Enemies” the Johnny Depp/Christian Bale new movie about John Dillinger. In his editorial Rich refers to “Dillinger’s Wild Ride,” by Elliott J. Gorn, a professor of history at Brown University. In Gorn’s book, Rich says “you learn that ordinary law-abiding Americans even wrote letters to newspapers and politicians defending Dillinger’s assault on banks. ‘Dillinger did not rob poor people,’ wrote one correspondent to The Indianapolis Star. ‘He robbed those who became rich by robbing the poor.’”
Given the cult fiction of romance around outlaws and the current state of affairs, maybe “Hung” is what’s needed: a tickler for America’s dreams with a sexual hook that drags in our naughty focus on that natural thing, sex; A chance to escape the uncontrolled life and fixate on someone who is as helpless as we feel, using his “talent” to screw someone else, revenge for how we have been screwed.

Mist of Morning

The mist of morning rises
I wake to find you gone
leaving behind just memory
while you, your self move on
sunlight softly filters
through strands of willow tree
wind-tugged, gently echoing
things that used to be

It’s Death . . .

. . . screamed Jessica Rabbit, hanging from a hook, facing the noozle of dip that will be her demise if it hits her.

Farrah Fawcett, Michael Jackson, Billy Mays, Ed McMahon, Farrah Fawcett, Michael Jackson, Fayette Pinkney (one of the 3 degrees, of ‘when will I see you again fame’), Sky Saxon, Gale Storm, the man who came up with the concept of the cell phone (big as a brick, weighed in at about 3 pounds and cost almost $4,000), and now my old boss from when I worked in Boston.

Update: Karl Malden and Mollie Sugden:



Pictures of the gone world 11 by Lawrence Ferlinghetti
The world is a beautiful place
to be born into
if you don't mind happiness
not always being
so very much fun
if you don't mind a touch of hell
now and then
just when everything is fine
because even in heaven
they don't sing
all the time
The world is a beautiful place
to be born into
if you don't mind some people dying
all the time
or maybe only starving
some of the time
which isn't half so bad
if it isn't you
Oh the world is a beautiful place
to be born into
if you don't much mind
a few dead minds
in the higher places
or a bomb or two
now and then
in your upturned faces
or such other improprieties
as our Name Brand society
is prey to
with its men of distinction
and its men of extinction
and its priests
and other patrolmen
and its various segregations
and congressional investigations
and other constipations
that our fool flesh
is heir to
Yes the world is the best place of all
for a lot of such things as
making the fun scene
and making the love scene
and making the sad scene
and singing low songs and having inspirations
and walking around
looking at everything
and smelling flowers
and goosing statues
and even thinking
and kissing people and
making babies and wearing pants
and waving hats and
dancing
and going swimming in rivers
on picnics
in the middle of the summer
and just generally
'living it up'
Yes
but then right in the middle of it
comes the smiling
mortician

Or, as Mark Morford put it: . . . life is a wicked inscrutable orgy of love and compassion and survival instinct, shot through with pain and longing and death and suffering and far, far too many arguments . . .