Um, Blog posts makes it to 100, Reagan didn’t; Wake-up, News Directors!!

This is my 100th blog post since beginning this wordy journey in November of 2009.  A momentous occasion that I share with the Green Bay Packers’ victory on Super Bowl Sunday, so I will commemorate this occasion with some thoughts and realizations that are running through my brain, beginning with the question, WHY is PBS, NBC news and whoever else acting like one of our dead Presidents, Ronald Reagan, is still alive in the physical world?  This blog is alive at one-hundred; Reagan is not. I don’t want the notariety – I give it to myself, lol.  No other past President gets this treatment, and there are plenty who were better at it than Reagan in the modern era and historically in the USA!  OMG. Why are they promoting “Ronald Reagan at 100” as if this, the first-ever real “acting President” (just another Hollywood role for him)  is still around?  WTF?

They don’t do this with John F. Kennedy, who was hands-down much better a President on his “birthday” – in fact I don’t even know when JFK’s birthday is, even though it is just an Ask.com search away; even Eisenhower was a better republican and President; how about Lyndon Johnson?  Why not dig-up Nixon’s Capricorn birthday?  How old is he now?  Who appointed Ronnie Reagan the greatest President of all time? Silly network News Directors, that is who.   This is television News Director bias, and it shows that with all the other stuff that we can “celebrate” about humanity, these people are unqualified for their jobs.    

I LOVE the PBSNewshour btw; it is the best newscast and most non-sidetaking  of all.  That is why it is so bewildering for them to want to glorify a mediocre President like Reagan.  Speaking of Presidents, having President Obama blend into the mediocrity of his predicessors in office proves one thing for sure: NO President, no matter the color of skin, gender or mindset can effect real change under the present circumstances and rules.  Corporations, especially technological ones, are the real pushers of our collective “envelope”.  Why?  Term Limits.  Once they were enacted, they sealed the fateful deal visa v “democracy”.  Oh, sure, limits are wonderful if an asshole with dictatorial leanings is elected.  However, if you get a genuinely good person who is popular with the majority of Americans, the system is “fixed” so that  there is eventual gridlock guaranteed and the necessary time that a person would need to truly enact a new direction for the nation is not available.  Why doesn’t anybody in the news organizations revisit that debate instead of trying to put a mediocre President on Mount Rushmore?

I remember Reagan most for breaking the air traffic controllers union, and starting us on a path of union-busting and industry deregulation that we are still paying for with something called unemployment!  My late father used to say that “Reagan enacts laws upon the backs of those who can least afford them…”  Prophecy fulfilled, Dad.  Reagan ignored Black Americans and other minorities as if we would just “go away” magically.  There are plenty of ordinary global citizens who are one-hundred years old, who deserve more kudos than Ronald Reagan – obviously this is another corporate media conspiracy inspired by fans of “the gipper”, a fictional movie character, to coincide with Super Bowl Sunday.   

Pickhit: Congrats to the Green Bay Packers (who I picked, btw), my tele was quieter than ever in recent memory on a Super Sunday, however, and I missed being at my dearly departed friend Rodney’s “garagemahal” watching it (see my post “Ashes to….”); and – can we stop covering the personal lives of athletes past and present, please?  We, who have any lives of our own to manage, do not care.

Sureshot: For those of us who “cut the cable”, it was very dramatic trying to find a stable stream of the Super Bowl game. I heard that if you searched for atdhe.net, an emblem and badge from Homeland Security appeared with the words “this domain has been seized…” Wow! Why did they  comandeer them?  Hmmm, people watched games there all season, why now?  Maybe the greedy misguided Grinch, “Mr. Roger” (Goodell), made a phone call?  Upon leaving church early this afternoon, the world had the feel of it seriously losing it’s grip.  Several people died in January; two women who were close to me, including one of my two remaining Aunts on Mum’s side.  Serious sadness among the madness.

World Premiere: My informal “poll” of the Egyptian tobacco/lottery/beer store owners in this city says NONE of them want to see Mubarak leave, and that the USA should stay out of events there.  They tell me that this whole scenario is a ploy to install a bin Laden sympathizer “government” so that they can surround Israel,  challenge the Saudis and then export the  ideology of the whole world adopting their version of the muslim religion.  You heard it here first. If I were President, we’d return to a version of “isolationism” that I learned in  my ninth grade Social Studies class for a while.  Take a deep breath, y’all.   Peace.

My Vinyl Lena Horne/ Giving You Some Happiness

I figure since there is such a plethora of Lena Horne posts, that I will chime-in  to drop science on how I came to know Lena after my Dad won her albums as part of an RCA Records collection and “brand new RCA COLOR TV” ( back when they had vacuum tubes inside) on “The Price Is Right” back in 1962.  Therefore, I offer you some friendly cheerfulness via my vinyl Lena Horne tribute.  Here is an album cover that is amongst the ones he won. 

 My Aunts and Uncles’ conversations at family gatherings, always mentioned that Lena was “passing” [for a white woman] sometimes [ light-skinned blacks did that back then to gain acceptance in the general market ] and yet, there was a grudging respect and envy of her by my Aunts, especially.  According to Lena’s daughter, Gail Lumet Buckley, her mother never tried to do that, but was often a frustrated forerunner of the movement to equality as she tried to navigate her career while staying true to herself and the mentoring of Paul Robeson.  My most recent memory is when she shook my hand and autographed my program for the 1994 Impact Radio Music Convention in Atlantic City shortly after she was on the dais introducing radio icon Hal Jackson at the radio Legends Dinner – in fact I have her lovely voice on one of my “on-location diary” tapes from that evening.  I promptly gave that autographed piece to my Mum – who doesn’t really know where it is now – and which most likely was destroyed in a house fire back there where I grew up,  in 2000.   Here is another my Dad won in the collection:

 Nevertheless, I was Sooo surprised and thrilled to meet and talk to her garcious presence one-on-one as if she was a member of the family,  on my older family’s behalf that evening at the convention!

Annd here’s another cover of a great Lena album my family has:

Ms. Horne was always a beautiful and classy lady and performer/advocate for civil rights and equality for Black Americans when there was none and even  she  was ushered through the back door to perform in front of predominately Caucasian audiences.  I am glad it outraged her, inspiring her to achieve change, and current “stars” like Whitney Houston (who I used to admire with a crush) would serve themselves well to mold their images in Lena’s likeness.  Here is her house which still stands near my parents’ house in St. Albans, Queens :

And so NOW…again, “for something completely different” and upon whose beautiful and progressive shoulders many performers who are “darker than blue” stand …I reviewed Heather Johnson‘s CD  for the dance music web column several weeks back, and it is my Mid-May 2010 gift to you, on behalf of Ms. Horne. 

I always know a smash when after reviewing it, I keep playing it weeks and months later while outside on my front porch in “chill/research/study mode”. 

You’ll probably come back to this track a few times until you are hooked – it’s alright; it is infectious!  “May I have this dance?”

Video Boy Scouts

I was a Cub and a Boy Scout.  Troop 109,  in the mid 1960s.  I saw on NBC where the Boy Scouts of today are offering a merit “belt loop”(or whatever they changed the name of a merit badge  to) in Video Games.

So  before I go and choose-up a game of Major League Baseball or Derek Jeter Baseball on my old Playstation 2, I wanted to point out the pros and cons of this latest update to Scouting tradition, and possibly the end of boyhood as I knew it, here we go:

PRO: “a video games merit accomplishment is riding a trend that is real for the kids of today; Giving more skill in things you like to do; to give a Scout a chance to try out new activities, so that you can find new things you really like…

Con: Increases “tenderfootedness”; Bad for the legacy of Scouting as being something you do out of doors; learning how to tie various knots; camping in tents without electricity (which I think everybody should experience); marching in the Memorial Day, July Fourth and Labor Day parades in uniform with your troop or “den”; showing-off your uniform to the neighborhood; learning how to play an instrument so that you can play it in the parade; the scouting Handbook – which will have to be rewritten with a video gaming chapter right after the “Merit Badge Program Chapter 24” In my handbook.

While talking with my Mum on the tele about her church, she commented about how the congregation has changed with the neighborhood’s demographics, and mentioned how when she brought me to join the Cub Scout troop, the other mothers “took it down to the basement” LOL  In other words, they didn’t want to integrate the troop.  Being that as it was, and that is a totally different post,  it reminded me that the church was the home base for our Scouting troop back in the days , which I had forgotten.

My core says this is yet another example of the “dumbing-down of America”, and maybe a visit to the Merit Badge Counselor (page 421 of my Handbook) is in order.

“BOOK Excerpt: “Dave – An Adult Child Support (Choice) Story”

Dave

His favorite cocktail was a “Red Snapper” (Crown Royal and Cranberry juice) short and neat with a cherry.  He almost didn’t fit in with the rest of his casino co-workers; too nice or straight-laced and clean-cut.  He tried to play the part, and I could tell that often they tried to make him the butt of their practical jokes. As he got to feel comfortable with me, he’d stop at my bar first and began to open up about his personal life.  Apparently he too had a relationship nightmare with a woman back somewhere in Pennsylvania and there was drama over a daughter that either he wasn’t allowed to see or that wasn’t really “his”; it varied from week to week.  What was certain was that here was a misunderstanding, money involved and that hurt this young man deeply.  I could tell that from the tears that welled in his eyes when he came close to getting down to the nitty-gritty about it with me – often after the second Snapper.

This one particular night he was particularly distraught.  His weekend visit into Pennsylvania with the female had not gone well and he is almost crying as he tells me his story, when I lean towards him over the bar and say, “Let me tell you something and maybe you won’t feel so hopeless. I’ve heard of that happening, ‘Man, it is like they don’t want a guy to be able to make a living or suntin,”

Suddenly a fifty-thousand dollar pendulum swinging back and forth over his prone body, getting closer and closer to slicing him up and ending his life.   This “child” is apparently thirty years old by now!  “Isn’t there some statute of limitations on a female coming after you at this late date?” Dave asks. “How’d they find you?”

He told me his lesbian and sex-starved “sister”, who is twenty years younger-than-he pointed the snoops in his direction against his wishes when suddenly sheriffs and police began to terrorize the house he grew up in, about five months ago – a betrayal that has not gone unnoticed.   He lost his tax refund for this year because they took it for this “debt”.  “That was my rent money, ‘Man!” he said.

This most recent unjust tax threatens to end life for those who want to pursue what few dreams that I have left in mind.  A shackle like this changes he way men manage their lives and injects fear and paranoia where there was none in mind previously. By taking his tax refund, all they do is unjustly penalize and hurt men short-term – like a dead man walking.

He said, “Its time to encourage an amendment to these laws that will allow this amount to be deducted from an account associated with this action in one lump sum. After all Dave said, maybe the Social Security number has already been besmirched in order to locate potential victims of these laws like me (a use for which it was never intended, you know), so while they are into my “private” account, just go ahead and take the whole sum and be done with it?” 
This is an interesting remedy for an older gentleman who cannot afford another “car payment”. Of course a guy could then choose either to get involved with said female again or not. “Wow man, choice, what a novel idea,” said Dave sarcastically.

What is the point of this greedy action?  It will NOT create a family or a “father” for an illegitimate child birthed by an unmarried woman who, if I remember correctly, the case was an acquaintance for only three weeks after some former co-worker set him up with her as a “blind date”.  She’d dumped him for another man or men – no reason given . When heard from  again briefly months later, she told him she was pregnant. He asked her, “So where is the ‘father’?”  “He left me,” she replied.  I think she fooled-around with a few guys, and didn’t know who the unlucky bastard was.

The a paternity test maybe umpteen years ago, and the result was “inconclusive”, so he didn’t worry much about it anymore, even though the first time they even heard of this female’s actions was when the state of Connecticut took his driver’s license away out of the blue in true draconian style.

Yes they fooled around during that brief time period – so did everyone back then (and even nowadays).  That doesn’t give a female Carte Blanche to be a ball-and-chain on a man who desires no relationship with her, for the rest of his days.  Dave might have been open to the idea if she came to him within the first weeks she found out about her condition, but to jump out of the alley and mug him years after she gave birth is behavior that should not be rewarded!

Most guys I know would not WANT to have any dealings with such a selfish and capricious female who would ruin three lives when a simple abortion or giving it up for adoption would have solved the problem. I remember that my parents always said to me, “Don’t bring home no bastards into this house!”  And I knew what they meant and never wanted to shame the family like that.  Ya know, there is a reason births like that were called “illegitimate”  until child support enabled this culture of the “single mom” at the expense of many men who are great people who got caught like dolphins in a fishing net – that stigma should be restored.

This is mentally traumatic and physically debilitating; Dave cannot sleep, and this will indeed shorten his life without some kind of intervention by a sympathetic entity or persons.

“So… I know your pain Dave,” I said.
I lamented as I sighed, “Last Call! Dave, here’s another one – it’s on me.” [Read what happens to Dave in “He’s In A Meeting, Adventures In Getting Past Gatekeepers…”]

Pickhit: for over a decade stuff like this has gone one with (mostly) guys being intimidated by a system and judiciary that dismisses their pleas, lumping every case into a one-size-fits-all formula instead. The field needs to be leveled.