Philly No Kings!

Super-callous-fragile-racist-sexist-Nazi-POTUS

Sign at NY protest.

Alex Witt was impressed.

For your viewing pleasure. Pass it along:

I was musing in the shower this morning that

with the passing of Chuck Norris, perhaps we have an opportunity to reflect upon how, perhaps, with a little creativity, we can create the equivalent of the Chuck Norris-type memes/jokes for Orangina.

For those of you who are not familiar with that which I am referring to, there are literally hundreds of sayings, for want of a better word which go like this:

Chuck Norris wears a hat to protect the Sun from him

Chuck Norris has a bearskin rug. It’s not dead, it’s just afraid to move.

A police officer pulled Chuck Norris over for speeding and Chuck let him off with a warning.

You get the idea: there are categories that Donnie can inhabit: liar, loser, bankruptcy, hair and makeup, the list goes on and on. A gifted comedy writer and his/her team could write fifty of these in a day and they would spread like wildfire. Like the Norris memes, they should be relatively short and to the point and consistent with what we know as Trump-cliches.

Just a thought.

Speaking of untreated severe mental illness, there was this patient of mine:

I first began treating him when he was in his mid 60s and he mercifully -for me- passed away in his mid 90s. He ran a very successful paper distribution business and had two sons, one who was diagnosed schizophrenic, and the other who was diagnosed schizotypal. His thoughts style was unlike anyone’s I’ve ever met before or since. The conversations I had with him were nearly indescribable because his frame of reference was so variable at any given instant that you never knew what sentence was going to come out of his mouth next.

What he would do routinely is take a supposition real or imagined, begin with a rational approach, and then diverge into what could be best described as fantastical, surrealistic, impossible to believe, but within the bounds of rationality, such that there was a finite chance that it might possibly have happened, but you sincerely doubted it. He would also segue from one subject to another with no intermediary, punctuation, or hesitation in his speech. I shall give you a virtually quoted rant, which he executed for me one time.

“You know, that woman, Hillary Clinton, the one in the White House? I really can’t stand her because she is not acting like a first lady should and takes way too much upon herself as though she’s speaking for the country, but nobody elected her. If I had a chance to talk to her, I would tell her this and then after I tell her this, she said to me that I was out of line and then I told her that she was the one who was out of line and what was she gonna do about it you know that filling you did for me last week bothered me for a couple days but I asked my son about it and he told me that it was probably OK. My wife wasn’t feeling well so I couldn’t ask her about it and anyway she wouldn’t wanna listen because she is having her own problems, including her back hurting and I told her it probably hurts because she hasn’t had sex with me for a while and all that muscle tension is all built up.and she needs to let it out or it’s going to kill her and when I asked the doctor about that, he told me that wasn’t true, but I know he’s lying because he wants to have sex with my wife and doesn’t want me to because I know I’m better at it than he is because his wife, who I met at the appliance store looks frustrated.”

This guy used to show up at 6 AM two out of three Saturdays and make me absolutely insane. The problem was that he was a 33rd° Mason and I treated all these people from the Masonic Temple who were both afraid of him and quietly hated his guts, but told me in no uncertain terms that it would be a bad idea to stop treating him and I am not to ask them why that would be . You think it’s easy being a healthcare practitioner don’t you?

So one day, I asked his delivery driver how he was able to maintain such a good business because he was crazy, so crazy, and the delivery driver said something really interesting. He said “OK, you own a pizzeria and the weekend is coming up and you are going to sell between 250 and 300 pies. If you don’t have the boxes, what are you going to do, put it on a napkin and tell them “good luck“? He always made sure that the deliveries were made whether it was to a diner with 30,000 napkins or a stadium that needed 5000 rolls of toilet paper. Unlike the big companies, he was never late and never needed to have excuses.“

My point all this is that he was a complete lunatic but functioned in business and society and yet by any measure, he needed severe psychiatric intervention, but in his case, to what end? As far as he was concerned, he was a success and “normal“.

The punch line for all of this was when he was in his 90s he really pissed me off one day, and I said to him “Aren’t you ever going to die?” And his reply, classic, was “not until all my enemies are dead… And that includes YOU!” I couldn’t stop laughing

But he was in my dental office, and this other lunatic is living on Pennsylvania Avenue, at least some of the time.

What a fucked-up world.

"Mutalization"

This word does not exist. The fronto-temporally impaired, illiterate, malignantly narcissistic, deteriorating so-called President has “coined” the word. The press now accepts it as a real word.

Upon reflection:

When Biden was elected, and my ebullience died down after an hour or two, I reflected that at least I won’t be seeing continual red-colored chyrons declaring Breaking News about something Trump has done to destabilize something.

Now I awaken every morning and prepare myself for The Daily Horror, which often eclipses almost anything from the last time we had to endure this nonsensical nightmare. Today we not only have the War, pending economic decline/collapse, and (fill-in-the-blanks), but the perplexing tragedy at La Guardia Airport.

I cannot imagine the disruption for tens of thousands of people as well as the tragedy of the loss of the two pilots. I cannot recall anything like this happening in recent memory. I feel like we are circling the drain.

For your Sunday viewing pleasure:

As I get old, and by definition I am aging daily,

I begin to reminisce about a number of things, some interesting and relevant, some not at all germane to today’s life.

In my lifetime I went to school with kids a couple years older than I who wore braces on their legs from polio. They were the lucky ones. Some people in my neighborhood were confined to iron lungs. I do recall that when an ambulance pulled up to a home, you more likely than not never saw that person again. Heart attacks were often fatal or there was a second one almost immediately and there was nothing anyone could do. I remember going to houses wherein we were told to keep our voices low so we wouldn’t cause someone’s grandparent to have another heart attack.

If someone wasn’t feeling well, and went to the doctor, it was not unheard of for the doctor to admit the patient to a local hospital wherein the general surgeon would perform an exploratory operation. If cancer were found enveloping an organ or spread elsewhere, the patient would be sewn up and sent home to make his or her final preparations. There were no CAT scans or MRI’s to ascertain anything.

There were no seat belts or airbags and steering wheels and dashboards were fabricated from metal. Front end collision at any real speed usually meant death to the occupants of the car (Weirdly, when airbags were invented, only the driver was saved from impact -there were jokes involving that fact).

It seemed that nearly everyone smoked cigarettes. If a family moved into the neighborhood it would be remarked when informing neighbors about them that amazingly, they were non-smokers and people might be put off by this, realizing that if they visited, they might not be allowed to smoke in the house. People had their brands to which they were loyal and one of the things I remember vividly was that when a pack was 33 cents at the store, they were 35 cents in a cigarette machine but there were two Pennies inside the cellophane for change if that machine were located in the store or just outside for Sunday sales.

Speaking of which, there were Blue Laws in many states and only necessities could be purchased on Sundays. Portions of the few supermarkets or grocery stores that were open were roped off where non-necessities were stacked. It was a very big deal in Pennsylvania when 7-11 Stores opened because you could buy food on Sundays but you did pay a premium except for milk, whose maximum price was fixed by the Commonwealth. And there were outdoor milk machines so you could buy a dispensed quart of milk off hours or Sundays. No bars or restaurants were permitted to serve alcohol until after most church services had been completed on Sundays.

There were all kinds of over the counter medicines and medicaments which no longer exist because they were outright ineffective or dangerous. They had been used for hundreds of years routinely. Mercurochrome contained mercury which, if dosed sufficiently, is poisonous. Tincture of merthiolate was another, also with mercury -there is still merthiolate but it doesn’t utilize the metal anymore. I loved the smell of the anti-bacterial ST-37 which I believe is gone as well. The introduction of Bactine eliminated a lot of these medicaments because the company advertised it magnificently.

I know many here don’t like very long posts so I’ll stop here. Oh…one more thing. Standard Oil Company’s gasoline was called Esso in many regions. They changed it to Exxon and what they did was take the “Tiger in the Tank” cartoon and have it carrying the Exxon sign up the gas station pole for a couple months and then had it carrying the Esso station sign down having placed a new Exxon sign at the top. Very clever.

Have a great weekend everyone!!!

See, we are all missing the point:

When Trump and his minions talk about going after the “worst of the worst“, they are not referring to the same group of individuals that perhaps you and I are.

He’s referring to brown people, black people, anyone who speaks in a foreign accent, people who voted for a Democrat, anyone who doubts MAGA’s righteousness, non-Christians, legitimate medical professionals, lawyers who represent any of the above, any woman who has had a pregnancy terminated for any reason at all whatsoever, and lastly, anyone at any time for any reason at all whatsoever.

It’s pure Nazism.