cyclonefence
cyclonefence's JournalWish? Did somebody say wish?
Rita the Mail Lady (Epatha Merkerson) "fan mail from some flounder?", Cowboy Curtis
(Laurence Fishburne) "you know what big boots mean, Pee Wee--big feet!", Captain Carl (of course) "A sailor sails on many many seas, anywhere he pleases; and he always remembers to wash his hands, so's he don't get no diseases", Magic Screen and his cousin, Magic Johnson; Miss Yvonne the most beautiful woman in Puppetland, Chairy and Floory and Clocky, and the Cowntess and Randy the Bad Boy--all the way back to the Groundlings and Pee Wee's friend Hammy and the shoe mirrors so he and Pee Wee could look up girls' dresses--down to the vigilante crime fighter/criminal with a cape on Reno 911,
You bet I have a wish, Jamby. I wish Paul Reubens were alive and healthy, and I could give him a hug and a kiss and tell him how much I love him and will miss him for the rest of my life.
Damn house finches
I put up with the starlings when they swoop in and eat all the suet in 15 minutes because they are so entertaining in the birdbath--boy they love to splash around--but the damn house finches treat the sunflower seed feeder like Starbucks. They perch on *all* the feeding perches and then just sit there for what seems like hours, working on their birdie computers or something. The sweet little songbirds--chickadees and titmice and even their cousins the goldfinches flutter around futilely, hungry for a bite. The better-behaved birds eat and move along, so everyone gets a turn. But not these jerks.
And you know what makes it worse? Somebody comes to visit and sees them out the window, and they squeal "Ooooh--you have purple finches." Almost as bad as the ones who argue with me that the red-bellied woodpeckers are red-headed woodpeckers.
You remind me of a man
What man?
The man with the power
What power?
The power of hoo-doo
Hoo-doo?!
You do
I do what?
Remind me of a man
What man?
Repeat with your brother in the back seat until your mother tells you if you don't stop she's going to pull the car over and you two can just walk home.
Slow on the uptake
When I was a little girl, my friend David Rosenberger told me "Can't tell you a joke on Wednesday for fear you'll laugh in church on Sunday." I think he must have heard adults say that about someone because the jokes David and I told were of the knock-knock variety, and I got them.
I was a hick from WV on my way to college, alone, and I had a layover in NYC. I went to a cafe for a sandwich, and a friendly waiter said, "You know what French dressing is?" "Yes sir." "And Italian dressing?" "Yes sir." "Well, then, what is Irish dressing?" I didn't know, and he said "Mayo!" Well, I laughed politely, but I didn't get it. I knew Mayo was a county in Ireland, but what that had to do with salad dressing was beyond me. After a while up north, I realized that "mayo" meant what I called "maynaze," and the joke was pretty funny.
I was grown and married when a nice old man in the grocery checkout line asked me if I wanted to hear a joke. "Sure." "Two men walked into a bar, but the third man ducked."
I laughed and laughed, but I didn't get it. I went home and told my husband, and he explained it to me.
I loved cowboys and cowgirls when I was a really little girl, and my father made up endless stories for me about the hero Three-gun Smith (who "ambled along, lazy-like" through his adventures). Three-gun always got in big trouble when the bad guy took his two pistols from Three-gun's holster. Things looked pretty bad, and then in the nick of time, Three-gun reached around his back and pulled out that third gun.
I was 60 years old when I realized where that third gun had been stashed.
My father was one hell of a story teller.
Thinking about slavery as vocational training
and a poster mentioned that a relative of theirs always hired Black help because they knew how to cook from a heritage of cooking as slaves.
My grandmother Anderson, who was white, was taken out of school when she was in second grade and put to work in her stepmother's boarding house. She learned to cook good food (I can attest to this!) in quantity, how to serve it and clean up afterward. As a child, she could make light biscuits and savory gravy, salt-rising bread and fried pies (for the railroad men who were the main clientele of the boarding house) to be taken along in a lunch pail.
She learned how to clean house and wash, starch and iron mountains of sheets and the underwear and socks of men who were going to be back in a couple of days. And understand, this was with a washboard and a cake of lye soap, in a cauldron of boiling water over a coal stove in the basement. The dirt she was washing out was coal dirt, which is foul and gets up your nose and makes your boogers black.
She hauled buckets of coal to keep the furnace going and cleaned the windows weekly because of the filth the coal put on them..
She worked like a dog, morning to night.
When she was 16, my grandfather, an engineer for the C&O, stayed at the boarding house, and they fell in love, and he rescued her.
Had she been a Black, enslaved woman, her work might have been similar; her being deprived of an education certainly was--although she had learned to read--and there would have been no rescue.
Further, she worked for her family's business--the owner was, after all, her stepmother--and she was not beaten or otherwise physically mistreated (other than being made to work starting at age 7). IOW, she went to Vo-Tech, too, just like those lucky slaves who were being trained for careers! The slaves, I guess, had the added benefit of job security for life.
I think being "woke" ought to make white people feel bad
As Frank Zappa put it, "I'm white, but lots of times I wish I was black."
Of course little children, white or black, shouldn't be made to feel bad about the color of their skin. But they ought, white or black, to be taught what happened. Slavery is a fact, and hiding that fact doesn't do anybody any good.
But by the sixth grade, white and black children ought to understand that what helped make--maybe more than anything else--the US the economic powerhouse it became from the late 18th century to today is the *fact* that rich white Americans had the inestimable benefit--over the rest of the world!--of not having to pay for labor in the production of some of the greatest money-making exports of the time: cotton, indigo, tobacco. Imagine the advantage of not having to pay workers!
Whether or not your family owned slaves--even if you spring from the loins of the greatest white abolitionists of the time--if you are white, you benefited from slave labor. Slave labor gave rich white men, like the Founding Fathers, the wealth and leisure time to become highly educated (ironically, it was the Enlightenment, Rights of Man and all that) while making sure the labor force continued to be unable to read.
It of course should not be presented so baldly to young children, but they ought to begin to learn about white debt--America's debt--to the black contributions to our wealth and greatness. By high school, I think children should have an understanding of systemic racism, why it is wrong, and white people's embracing of it--consciously and unconsciously--and what we all can do to begin to address it.
"Woke" is something all children by 18 ought to understand, and if it makes them ashamed to be white--well, good. That's impetus to find out what to do about it, and reading Ta-Nahisi Coates is the best way I know to begin.
Is it an earworm
if it isn't a tune but a phrase?
Mark Twain wrote somewhere (I read this as a child at my grandparents' house) that he couldn't get this out of his head:
"Punch, brother, punch with care; punch in the presence of the passenjare" referring to conductors' punching your ticket on the train.
I don't recall where Twain said he'd heard this, but he just couldn't get it out of his head.
Now I have one. With a new grandchild, I've been looking through our books to find things to read with him, and suddenly Edward Gorey's ABC's came into my brain. I can remember only A and B, but it's enough, believe me:
"A is for Alice, who fell down the stairs; B is for Basil, eaten by bears."
I don't dare find the book and read the rest of the alphabet. I have a strange talent for involuntarily memorizing poems I like, and my god, my poor brain couldn't handle ?Cecil? and whatever unfortunate child who was blessed with a name beginning with D.
I watched some of the coronation last night
(I didn't know where to put this post; it seems too frivolous for GD, but not jokey enough for the Lounge, so if somebody wants me to move it, please let me know)
and looking at Charles's British Twit face I began to wonder how many of his school notebooks, starting around age 12, were covered with doodles like "Charles Rex" and "King Charles the Third" and "Charles R"--like teenage girls practice writing their married names. I wonder how many different writing styles--fonts, even--he tried out, for all those decades.
I wonder if he planned his coronation the way some girls dream about their weddings, what to wear, which crown--"does this one make me look fat?"--and who would be seated next to whom at the reception. "Oh Mummy do I *have* to have the Breaazers there? And Diana's brother?" and the Queen rolling her eyes and pretending she didn't hear him.
And how many years has Camilla been forced to listen to mix tapes?
How do I unsubscribe to DU popup announcements
Settings? I can't find any way to get rid of these annoying pimples.
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