It's been a busy week and I haven't been able to update this blog. I have been trying to think of something I could write about other than tattoos, but lately they seem to be on my mind.
Perhaps it's because it's winter, and everyone is covered up. I haven't seen any tattoos lately, and I find myself, in an odd way, missing them. I say odd because I have a negative view of tats. Old school, my lifelong perception is of tattoos as being done to drunken sailors in tattoo parlors on waterfronts in foreign ports. However, I think, reluctantly, if someone chooses to have his/her skin permanently decorated, might as well be something good. And might as well be on a body part I like to look at.
Here's a Volkswagen fan. I wonder if this person was paid by VW.
Someone went to the pain and agony of having needle applied to instep of foot and tender toes for Volkswagen? The only way I'd do that is if they'd pay me, because my toes, tattooed or not, aren't worth looking at. There's also an admonishment on one tattoo site, saying that tattoos on feet tend to fade, and may at some point have to be retraced. Double the torture! And speaking of pain, how painful is it to get one's tongue tattooed? I'd worry an illustrated tongue would distract my dentist while he was doing some delicate work in my mouth.
Mad magazine did a couple of tattoo-themed things in the 1950s. In those days tattooing a girl, like Miss Deviant Nation above, was a joke.
The other represents the 1950's image of people who get tattoos. Most of the pictures I find online of tattoos are of fresh, bright colors on supple young skin. My advice is that what looks good now may not look so good in 40 years, faded, on sagging flesh. Or is it you believe you'll never get old?
On a late summer day I waited in a line at the pharmacy. I was aware someone had come up behind me and when I turned to see who it was beheld a vision: a tall young Asian woman, wearing flip-flops, a pair of (very) short-shorts and an abbreviated top. She smiled at me, in that indulgent way beautiful young girls smile at men stunned by beauty. Since it would have been impolite to continue staring I took a mental snapshot, and it's that I'm looking at now as I describe her to you. Over her left breast--what I can see of it--is a tattoo of a butterfly, which if my mental photo is correct, continues on to her breast itself. It would been completely wrong to ask her, "May I see your tattoo, my dear?"
I still have a negative image of tattoos, although in the case of the young Asian woman it seemed to emphasize, rather than detract, from her natural beauty.
A few days ago, going through the Google Life magazine archives, I found an interesting article from 1936, explaining that one in ten Americans has a tattoo. Huh! Where did they get that statistic? They don't say, but they show some examples of living canvases for the tattooists' art, including a dead ringer for Curly Howard of the Three Stooges, and even one of the artists. Check out tattooist Apache Harry, with his long hair. This doesn't seem out of place in 2010, although Harry must have caused quite a stir in 1936, even in New York City.
There is no shortage of pictures on the Internet of lovely young women with tats. I'm pretty sure that 75 years later Harry has gone on to the great tattoo parlor in the sky, but his legacy lives on.
I was behind a young man in a checkout line at the local Walgreen's yesterday. He was buying four packs of Camel cigarettes. He handed the checker a $20.00 bill but didn't get back much change. In my state they raised the state tax on a pack of cigarettes to $1.50, bringing the price of a pack of cigs to well over $4.00. For that reason alone I'm surprised that people still smoke. Or should I be surprised? When it comes to feeding addictions people will pay about anything, whether they can afford it or not. An addiction is a true luxury.
Besides being addicting, smoking is a poke in the eye of political correctness. If you want to show you're anti-establishment, just fire up a cig.
When I was a smoker it was before smokers became pariahs. Nowadays if a working person wants to light up a gasper on the job they go outside in the weather to smoke. In my day I smoked anywhere I felt like, even in the grocery store while shopping. What a jerk! I didn't know I was a jerk, and nobody told me. In those days it was impolite to tell a stranger their smoke was assaulting you. Those days are gone.
No one is immune from tobacco addiction. Even the President of the U.S.sneaks a smoke now and again.
President Clinton might have had the most notorious smoke of all, when he put a cigar in his mouth that had just been inside the White House intern, Monica Lewinsky.
A few years ago there was some controversy because as the calls to ban smoking in public places got louder, the movies got smokier. It seemed that more characters in movies were smoking. That had something to do with product placement by tobacco companies, getting around the ban on advertising. But in period pictures there would be a lot off smoking, because for much of the Twentieth Century cigarette smoking was considered a personal choice, and everybody did it. Inf the HBO series, Boardwalk Empire, set in 1920 Atlantic City, New Jersey, it seems every character smokes a cigarette a couple of times per episode. It's a good thing we can see the smoking, but don't have to smell it, or I'd have to air out my house after every episode.
I was a totally addicted two-pack-a-day smoker for years. By 1977, when I quit, laws against smoking in public places were beginning to be passed. The price of cigarettes had gone to 65¢ a pack. Outrageous! I had paid 32¢ a pack in 1968 when I got out of the Army, but 17¢ for American cigarettes in the Army PX in Germany.
After I quit I would have an occasional dream about smoking. I could feel the sensation of the smoke in my throat, the brief ecstasy as the nicotine in my bloodstream hit my brain and went straight to the pleasure center. "Just like cocaine," as I heard a doctor once explain. When I woke from a smoke dream I'd have a moment when I'd miss smoking, but I didn't miss sitting on the edge of the bed for several minutes coughing, hacking up phlegm. I didn't miss falling asleep with a burning cigarette in my hand, or dropping it into my lap while I drove my car. I'm lucky to be alive, folks. I had some close calls, but my risk factor dropped when I stopped. Smoking is more of a nightmare than a dream. There is more than one way for cigarettes to kill you. Santa Claus won't tell you that.
When I saw the young guy buying the four packs of Camels the other day I figured that the $20.00 he was spending then was cheap compared to what he'll be spending later. I felt sorry for him, knowing just how he felt, that he "just gotta have another cigarette."
Occasionally I go on a surfin' safari of the Web to find entertaining blogs. As if I didn't have enough to do! Arrrgh. The Internet is almost as bad as television for killing time, but on television you don't get the individuality, the quirkiness and personality you find in blogs. These are some blogs I recommend, and will also put them with my links so you can easily access them (after you read my blog, of cuss).
First up is Christian Nymphos, which sounds like a porn site, but is actually a site for Christian wives with a strong sex drive, discussing sex, and also whether certain acts, i.e., anal sex, cunnilingus, fellatio, etc., are immoral within marriage.
Click on the links and not on the illustrations to go to the blogs.
Christian Nymphos is an entertaining and reader-driven blog, and I have read some good advice from women to other women. Whatever gets you off, Christian gals!
I'm a lifelong fan of the late bizarre cartoonist, Basil Wolverton. His son, Monte, carries on the tradition, working in a modified form of his dad's distinctive style. Monte does, among his other artistic endeavors, editorial cartoons for Cagle.com. When you go to his site you see examples of his work, plus examples of his father's. I'm sure Basil would approve heartily of Monte's career choice.
We've got two sites with "bad" in their titles. First is Bad Mags, from the books of the same name by Tom Brinkmann.
Tom has collected some of the sleaziest exploitation, porn, and utter weirdness put onto magazine racks in the United States over the past 60 years or so. Remember, trees died so these magazines could live, and yet most of them would be forgotten, moldering in landfills if not for Tom's efforts to keep their memories alive.
Our second "bad" blog is Bad Bad Teacher, which has news stories about teachers accused of having sex with underage students. Even though I've featured several stories of teacher-student sexual encounters ending up in court, even I'm shocked by how much of this is going on. And you can probably figure for every one that gets caught, there are more that don't.
Here's one, Jennifer Gardel, who a jury just found guilty as charged:
Finally for this posting is LP Cover Lover, which shows some of the stranger and more bizarre record album covers from around the world, submitted by readers. Some of these covers have to be seen to be believed. Here's one that I think would fit in the above Christian Nymphos blog. If ever I've seen a gaggle of girls repressing their sexuality it's this big hair bunch.
Black Friday's a'comin', so hide your credit cards. Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, the traditional first day of Christmas shopping, is the day that big retailers like Walmart, the Gap, Sears, Best Buy, etc., try to make us feel bad for not spending more money with them. We haul out the plastic, pushing ourselves further into indebtedness for their benefit. I refuse to accept any responsibility for any store's bottom line. Growing up I was taught that thrift was a virtue, but now Americans are taught that spending, and often way beyond our means, is patriotic by being "good for the economy."
As a retiree on a pension it's important that I save money. For years my wife and I have shopped in thrift stores, and they're becoming even more popular during the bad economy. With careful shopping I can still have some of the things I want. Yesterday I bought a sports coat with the Lands End label for $10.00. A few days ago, at a fraction of the retail price, my wife bought a new top to wear to a special occasion. Many thrift stores--and you have to look through their stock--accept overruns from manufacturers and outdated clothing from department stores, who donate them for tax purposes. We’ve gotten a lot of new name brand merchandise for just a few dollars.
Last week I bought an RCA DVD from my local non-profit thrift store for $12.00. It needed a remote. I rummaged through a shelf full of television remotes, old cell phones and used cameras; I found an RCA remote for $1.00. I needed AAA batteries, which I got at Big Lots, not a thrift store but a discount retailer; I found an 8-pack of Duracell AAA alkaline batteries for $4.50. The remote works, the player works. Yippee. And using the calculator I paid fifty cents for, it all added up to $17.50.
We’d be pushing it to buy Christmas presents from a thrift store (even I’m not that cheap), but Sally found some brand-new cups with Christmas designs she will fill with goodies for her coworkers. She also routinely buys baskets for a dollar or so which she uses for unique ways to give gifts of food.
If there's a problem with shopping thrift stores it's not that you "get what you pay for," because often you get much more in value than it costs, but that it doesn't come with a warranty. If my DVD player quits on me then I'm out $12.00, but that's not really so much. I'll just shop around until I find another used machine in good condition.
There are a lot of bargains out there; you just have to keep looking.
Before the modern meaning of “Black Friday,” (a day when stores go “in the black” financially) it meant the day the stock market crashed in 1929. I’m not sure if that’s the meaning that Steely Dan had in mind because with Steely Dan and their sometimes opaque lyrics you just never know.
For a variety of reasons these cartoons from the 2010 New Yorker calendar made me laugh. Over 85 years after it began, and established its cartoons as being the smartest of all the smart magazines, they're still the smartest.
We Americans love war. We're always fighting a war or two. Or three.
We've been in Afghanistan since 2001, going into our tenth year. Looks like we're really in for the long haul. I wouldn't doubt we'll be there ten years from now, in one capacity or another. Oh well, we're out of the war in Iraq. Ha-ha. That's a joke, folks. We're "out" in name only. Something happens then we send troops back in, we're right back in it. As long as you declare a war over then you can do anything you want. It's just that after action stuff, mopping up, you know. Call a war by another name, because we like to use the word "war" for other things.
Like the War on Cancer. Didn't know about that war, did you? That was Richard Nixon's deal, back in about 1970, when he pledged massive amounts of federal dollars to help eliminate cancer. Gee, we'd done it with smallpox, polio, measles, mumps...but we've never really won against cancer. Maybe one of these days we'll win, but right now cancer continues its insurgency, guerrilla tactics, hiding out, striking when we least expect it to attack. As far as I know the War on Cancer is still being waged, with no armistice ever called.
How about the War on Crime? That was instituted in the sixties because half of the population was under the age of 25. As someone once said, "If you lock up all the young men between the ages of 15 and 23 crime will come to a halt." So why didn't we just do that? Americans have more people in prison per capita than any other country in the world. We could have just made it a national policy: put all the guys into prison for about 8 years when they turned 15, then turn them loose at 23. War's over! It's time for dancing in the streets. "We got no crime, 'cause all the boys doin' time!" I haven't seen any soldiers in the War on Crime marching in any victory parades lately.
And as a corollary to the War on Crime we have the ever popular War on Drugs. We still haven't won that war and never will. Americans love drugs. We love legal drugs, we love illegal drugs. We love drugs that make us high and drugs that make us hard. We love drugs that speed us up and slow us down. We love drugs that wake us up and drugs that put us to sleep. It's hard to fight a war when everyone loves the enemy. I admit, drug kingpins and drug wars in Mexico are problematic, but after all, it's on their side of the border, so sleep well, you drug warriors on this side of the Rio Grande. Just pop another Valium and forget all about those awful drug pushers.
How about that War on Poverty? Did that one get won yet? Do you remember, going back to the early '70s, and Richard Nixon again, when there was talk of a guaranteed annual income? At the time they were bandying around figures like a minimum of $10,000 a year for a family of four. Sounded good to me! I was making about $5,000 a year at the time. Some damn killjoys started hollering "socialism" and everyone backed off.
Then of course we have the War on Terror. That's not even a war; it was over on September 11, 2001 when some Saudi Arabians flew three planes into our buildings. Right then the terrorists won. They took away our security, they made us place ridiculous rules on travel. My wife and I are grandparents, sixty-somethings. OK, so I look kind of sinister, but my wife doesn't fit any profile of any terror group in the world. Still, we all go by the same rules to get on an airplane. We take off our shoes, our watches, stick our laptops into a plastic bin to go through an x-ray machine. Sometimes they make us go into a booth and stick our hands in the air like a game of stick-em-up. That's so they can look at us through our clothes.
If you want to opt out of that, then they get to feel you up, make sure you're not carrying a gun or weapon in your naughty bits. So just who are the current terrorists? The people who let you on airplanes as long as you follow their rules. Believe me, there would be no worse terror than being hustled off by security because you got balky about a major invasion of your privacy and personal space.
War is an overused word that has almost lost its meaning. It really means armed conflict between enemy nations. Edwin Starr feels strongly about it, and has a song he wants to sing about that kind of war. Take it away, Edwin!
The English language remake of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo stars Daniel Craig and newcomer Rooney Mara as Lisbeth. It will be released in 2011. I recently watched the 2009 Swedish language version of the movie, and don't know why it has to be remade. But I know my fellow countrymen don't like movies that aren't in English. The English translation of the book on which the movie is based is a best seller in the U.S., and Americans are generally not willing to support a film with subtitles. So, make it over!
Michael Nyqvist and Noomi Rapace play Michael Blomqvist and Lisbeth Salander, respectively, in this moody and sometimes very violent movie. Anyone who's been living in a cave or doesn't read fiction might not have heard the genesis of the novel, Men Who Hate Women (the title in Swedish), the first of a trilogy by the late Swedish journalist, Stieg Larsson. Larsson died at age 50 after plotting out 10 novels, but had finished three.
Like most popular mysteries, Dragon Tattoo is notable not just for its plot, but for the lead characters, Lisbeth and Michael. Noomi Rapace as Lisbeth walks away with the movie. Lisbeth is a girl with a terrible past, a ward of the state because of past violence. Rapace explained in an interview included with the DVD that she put herself on a diet and worked out to reshape her body to be more like a boy, rather than her softer, more female figure. It paid off; Lisbeth is totally believable.
We're shown just how violent Lisbeth can be when attacked by a gang of toughs in the subway, and manages to fight off several big guys.
As a warning to the sensitive, there are two violent rapes in this movie. The second rape is revenge for the first. Despite the brutality shown in both scenes, the watcher feels that justice, in its crudest form, has been done.
The journalist, Michael Blomqvist, is hired to find a girl, Harriet, who disappeared 40 years ago. Is she alive or dead? Her uncle, millionaire Henrik Vanger, thinks she has been murdered, and clues point in that direction.
Two stories are told simultaneously, of Lisbeth, a genius computer hacker with a photographic memory who has delved into Blomqvist’s case via stolen online information, and Blomqvist’s search for clues to the disappearance of Harriet. It’s when the stories converge, and Michael and Lisbeth get together, that the movie goes in unexpected directions.
If I have a complaint about the movie it’s the length, mostly in the ending, which is anticlimactic. It wraps up the mysteries, but could have been edited down without so much exposition. Despite the drawn-out denouements I highly recommend The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.
Sally told me, "Applebee's restaurant is offering a free meal to all veterans on Veterans Day. We should take advantage of it."
I said, "How do I prove I'm a veteran?" She said, "They said bring something that shows you're a vet, your discharge or wear your uniform." Huh. My uniform went to a thrift store about 40 years ago, and wouldn't fit me anyway. I took my framed Honorable Discharge from the United States Army off the wall, disassembled the frame, made a photocopy of the document on my scanner/copier/printer.
We decided lunchtime, noon to 1:00, would be too busy. If we got there about 2:00 p.m. we should be OK. So we did, and we weren't. The veterans were waiting in a long line inside the door to the restaurant.
The guys I saw looked a lot like me, "of an age," as we say. They mostly had on ball caps, some caps had the names of Navy ships. Several of the guys had white beards, just like me. I thought, all the Vietnam-era guys want to get in on the free food. I had told Sally I didn't want to wait in a long line, even for a free lunch. We drove up the street to a Village Inn restaurant. When we went in I noticed several men with their wives, and they looked just like the vets standing in line at Applebee's. They probably had the same idea as me; it wasn't worth waiting in line. When we were in the service we all waited in long lines.
We passed up a freebie, but Sally and I had a nice lunch and talked. It cost me $25.00, but my wife and I enjoyed it and I didn't have to wait.
November 11, 1968, 42 years ago today, was the last day of my two-year stint as a soldier in the U.S. Army. I flew home, greeted my family, and went on with my life. I was in the army during wartime, but never went to war. I was stationed in Germany. In the main I didn't sacrifice anything but a couple of years of my life.
On the other hand, a very special veteran came home yesterday, in time to be honored on Veterans Day. The story is told in my local paper this morning of George Willard Grismore, who was killed at age 30 in World War II, shot down in an airplane in which he was flying with five other men from Leyte to Mindanao to deliver fuel to Filipino guerrillas, and were never seen again.
George Willard Grismore
They weren't seen that is until their remains were found in 1999, at which time they were shipped to Hawaii for identification. They were taken to the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command Central Identification Laboratory. This is a program that employs 600 people whose job it is to identify the remains of "the nearly 88,000 soldiers still missing from the various wars," according to the article by columnist Paul Rolly in this morning's Salt Lake Tribune. Rolly is the nephew of Grismore, who died three years before Rolly was born. Rolly provided DNA because identification is made through the mother's line.
Sixty-five years is a long time to be away from home, away from loved ones. Time has taken its toll, and many of Grismore's loved ones are now deceased. But survivors of Grismore were there in the early morning hours when Grismore's casket, decorated with an American flag, was delivered.
I'm often angry with my country over wars it fights for dubious reasons. I think the wars in Vietnam and Iraq are good examples of wars we should never have fought, but I'm never angry with the men and women who go to war. They have no choice. Most soldiers are like me. They do their time, then they come home and live the rest of their lives. Some are damaged, physically and mentally, and some come home in a casket draped with a flag.
Happy Veterans Day to all the people who have served in the Armed Forces of the United States past and present.
Going through the Life magazine archives on Google Books yesterday I came across this startling photo from the May 20, 1966 issue. Two women with a device that looks like...well, you know what it looks like. It looks like a device that would bring a smile.
Queen Hope Cooke was all the rage for a while, in 1963 marrying the king of a small Himalayan country, but in 1970 the king was put in jail. She came back to he U.S., where she now lives. I wonder if she brought back the object.
I clipped "Spudboy" out of my local newspaper a few years ago, from an article about the local farmer's market. I cut off the information about the photographer, so I don't know who to credit. The picture is carefully posed to show off the very phallic looking potato the smirking boy is stroking. The young Harry Potter lookalike is holding it like Harry might hold his magic wand, with great respect.
The cover of the latest issue of Vanity Fair sells sexagenarian sex with Cher, who is now 64 years old. Cher has good genes and is still beautiful, but has the help of a skilled photographer, makeup, wigs, plastic surgery and Photoshop. I stood close to a stage one night in 1965, when she and then-husband Sonny Bono came through town and gave a concert. Cher was in her original incarnation, the 19-year-old in hip-hugger bell bottom pants and dark bangs in her eyes. Cher looked out and above the audience and did not see us. In front of me were three college guys with hats. They had it worked out so that every time Cher turned in our direction they would raise their caps in greeting to her. She never saw them because she never looked down from the stage to her audience. The boys lifted their caps four or five times, then finally gave up trying to get her attention.
Cher has had an amazing career spanning five decades, and she's a lot smoother now with an audience. She also has talent as an actor, with a new movie, Burlesque, coming out. She's survived in a tough business. If she cuts one more slice of cheesecake out of an aging body then more power to her.
The election results were disappointing to me, but the elections are over, at least. Time to move on.
And 2012 isn't that far away, so the presidential candidates should start lining up in a couple of months. This is the kind of thing that makes me glad the Mayans predicted the end of the world in 2012.
Because I'm sick of politics I've found solace in music, just like I have all my life. Instead of my CD collection I've gone surfing on YouTube. I'm always amazed at what I find there. Lately I've been thinking about the Marshall Tucker Band.I had a'hankerin' to hear some good redneck rock, so I went to YouTube and sure enough, there they were. And here they are, doing their own brand of country rock from the '70s, "Can't You See." The Marshall Tucker Band wore cowboy hats, but played a hybrid music, and even included a flute.
I also found a live clip of Lynyrd Skynyrd doing one my favorite redneck rock songs, "Gimme Three Steps."
I'm not sure Little Feat classify as redneck rockers, but "Dixie Chicken" is sure a redneck rock song. And singer Lowell George is wearing overalls. In this clip from Midnight Special the band is joined by Bonnie Raitt and Emmy Lou Harris, quite a pair of backup singers.
It's been a busy week and I haven't been able to update this blog. I have been trying to think of something I could write about other than tattoos, but lately they seem to be on my mind.
Here's a Volkswagen fan. I wonder if this person was paid by VW.
Someone went to the pain and agony of having needle applied to instep of foot and tender toes for Volkswagen? The only way I'd do that is if they'd pay me, because my toes, tattooed or not, aren't worth looking at. There's also an admonishment on one tattoo site, saying that tattoos on feet tend to fade, and may at some point have to be retraced. Double the torture!
And speaking of pain, how painful is it to get one's tongue tattooed? I'd worry an illustrated tongue would distract my dentist while he was doing some delicate work in my mouth.
Mad magazine did a couple of tattoo-themed things in the 1950s. In those days tattooing a girl, like Miss Deviant Nation above, was a joke.
The other represents the 1950's image of people who get tattoos.
Most of the pictures I find online of tattoos are of fresh, bright colors on supple young skin. My advice is that what looks good now may not look so good in 40 years, faded, on sagging flesh. Or is it you believe you'll never get old?
