A month ago I opined as to how I never hear the term hubba-hubba anymore by guys describing girls. Why is that? Hubba-hubba! is a great expression, but just not used, probably because of sexual harassment. I don't hear any wolf whistles, either.
I have some more hubba-hubba postings here, and here. Remember to click on the pictures to make them big.
Hubba-hubba to a girl who is out of this world...
Hubba-hubba to perfect Pam Grier...
Hubba-hubba to stripper Theresa White, who dived into bed with Olympian Michael Phelps and told the world about it...
Hubba-hubba to our pilgrim foremothers, without whom there would be no forefathers...
Hubba-hubba to schoolgirls who are naughty and need a spanking...
Hubba-hubba to the girls in their hats and dresses...
Hubba-hubba to bad girls behind bars...
Hubba-hubba to the classic Sophia...
Hubba-hubba to Amy Adams in her snappy hat, and taking her own classic turn as Rita Hayworth...
Hubba-hubba to the feline female...
...and finally, hubba-hubba to Ms. Goodwench.
I'm sure I'll have more of these in the future. I never run out of hubba-hubba! girls.
I'm sorry I'm a day late. I didn't get this message to you on Father's Day, but then I really don't know where to send it. By putting it in cyberspace maybe by chance you'll see it.
Saturday night Robert and I were talking about you. It's very interesting that your two sons remember you as being two different people. Each has a different perception of you and your relationship to us. He pointed out some things I hadn't thought about in many years, your laugh, your sense of humor, how you seemed to attract "characters," as you called them.
This morning I went through some old pictures and you might be interested in looking at them.
Here's one from your high school days. You look very mature for a teenager.
This next picture of you in your Stetson is from 1966. You were so proud of both that hat and your Buick Riviera. The Riviera is now considered a classic American car, but today a car like that would be too much of a gas guzzler. Gasoline is almost $3.00 a gallon, but if you find that unbelievable, last summer it went over $4.00 a gallon. A dollar is worth a lot less than when you died, more like a dime was 40 years ago.
Here's a picture that's kind of telling, I think. According to the date on the back it was taken July 29, 1967, just four months before you died. You look like you don't feel very well. On the back you've written, "a tired executive," and you do look tired. I remember your insomnia and unfortunately I also know about sleepless nights.
Here's an update. When I last saw you I was 19 years old, on my way to Germany with the U.S. Army. I'll be 62 in a few weeks. I'm retired from my three decades long career with the school district, and I've applied for Social Security. Rob works for an architectural firm as an artist. He uses a computer. Just like I'm typing this on. When you died computers were the size of a room. Now we have computers that fit on a desktop, or that fit in your lap. My wife, Sally, just bought one the size of a book that has more power than those early gigantic models. Science marches on.
Speaking of Sally, we've been married almost 41 years. I have one son, David, who was born in 1977. He married a Vietnamese girl in 2003. Yep, when you left us we were having a war with her countrymen, but that's been over for a long time. They in turn have two girls, oldest one 4 1/2, youngest just turning 3. They live in Pennsylvania. David took his family and moved across country for more opportunities. As a grandfather you can be proud of David, you can be proud of me for being his dad and having him turn out so well, and you can also be proud of Sally and me for being grandparents of such smart and attractive children.
Rob is currently single but has Mariana, who is from South America. She is a very charming and attractive person.
Dad, you might not remember this, but the last letter I got from you was about the heart attack you had at Thanksgiving, 1966. You said in that letter you had given up cigarette smoking, but you died very soon after that, on December 3, 1966. It wasn't your fault. In your generation smoking wasn't considered the health hazard it is today.
Dad, here's what you missed since you died: You missed the moon landing in July, 1969, you missed Dick Nixon's resignation from the presidency in 1974; you missed seeing the first black person elected to president in 2008.
You missed more wars...sadly, that's something we always have in abundance.
I can't even begin to tell you about cable and satellite television, cellular phones and the Internet. You just have to see them to understand, but there has been an information explosion undreamed of in the 1960s by even the most far-thinking futurist. No one foresaw attacks on our shores from terrorists in the 21st Century, and they didn't see that we'd be in a situation similar to the Great Depression by 2008, either, but we were attacked by terrorists in 2001, and we are currently in that precarious financial situation. I hope we learned some lessons from your era about getting ourselves out of our predicament.
Hey, Dad, hope I'm not being boring. I have thought about you a lot over the years. You've been dead since December, 1967, but I can still hear your voice in my head, I can still smell your aftershave. I saved the biggest news for us for last, and that was that Mom died a year ago May. She had been in a nursing home for four years. Unlike the moment you died, both Rob and I were at her side when she went. You'd be proud of Rob. He visited her every day.
I'm hoping that you, your sisters, Phyllis and Camille, your brothers-in-law Dan and Tom, your mother, Mary, your father, Dr. Parley, and our mother all get together for a family reunion in the great beyond.
Nowadays people say you and Mom are considered to be part of the Greatest Generation, those who went through World War II and the Great Depression and went on to build the world your children grew up in. Every day over 1,000 of your generation die. You just left us a lot sooner than most, but it doesn't mean you don't qualify for Greatest Generation status, because you do.
So, I hope you had a happy Father's Day. I spent mine thinking about you.
I read the news today, oh boy. The latest iPhone is out.
I'll be glad to not get an iPhone. I still have my old cellphone, so old I taped the back on when it broke after being dropped. It's so old there's no fancy stuff, no camera, no anything but a telephone.
President Obama and his Blackberry notwithstanding, how did we ever get along without cellphones? We didn't think about it, was how! I remember moving into my house in 1975 and having a party line, with the explanation from the phone company: "We don't have enough lines in your area." So I put up with a rude woman who was apparently on the phone 23 1/2 hours a day. Every time I'd pick up the phone to make a call she'd be there, yakking away. I called the phone company, demanded a private line and had it the same day. So much for not enough lines. I don't think anyone born after the 1970s would even know what a party line was and they'd be amazed to hear how they worked...or in my case, didn't work.
I found these two ads from 1954, where the seeds of private phones were born. I'll bet the Space Phones, for $1.00, probably didn't work the way they promised in the ad. I have no idea how they worked, since the ad says "no electric wires, no batteries." The ad says they vibrate, so maybe they have dual uses besides being a walkie-talkie.
The Zimphone seems a bit more what we're used to from the pre-cell days. It has a traditional looking handset, it has wire connecting two phones. It has only 50' of wire included, which isn't much, but with additional wire you can talk up to a mile!
Don't you wish you could send the coupons and get both of these phones? In 2009 $$$ they are a true bargain if they do what they say they do. No cellphone bills, that's for sure.
I realized looking at these incredible pictures that my family has never had an official portrait taken. That's because we know we'd end up looking like these people.
Nowadays the line, as in "that's over the line," has moved. It's moved quite a ways as far as I can see. Morbidity affects television, which wasn't true in the past. Even in a crime story we didn't have to look at graphic autopsies or murder victims with slashed throats or exploded heads. There was a line of propriety and now television, following the lead of movies, has rolled over that line and obliterated it.
That's the way I felt when I looked at the above cartoon in the June 8-June15 double issue of The New Yorker. I'm no stranger to cartoons using horror or morbidity as a subject. Gahan Wilson and before him, Chas Addams, were geniuses with the themes. I just don't remember ever seeing a cartoon from either of them where the cartoon concerned a person getting murdered and the killer complaining that the murder weapon was insufficient.
Here are some examples of "behind the line," in my opinion. Cartoons that, despite the subject matter, don't step over the line. Here are couple of cartoons, the first by Chas Addams and the second by Gahan Wilson, with the theme of suicide.
In the Addams cartoon the brightness of the Boy Scout walking in on his suicidal dad is so ludicrous it quickly defuses the horribleness of the situation. If Addams had shown the father hanging that would have been over the line.
In the Wilson cartoon the nurse is chiding the patient with "no fair" in turning off his own machine, as if she's so officious she considers it her job alone.
In the other cartoons a wife cheerily invites her husband into her booby-trapped room, and torturers yuk it up over a comedic torture victim.
You'd call those cartoons incongruities, I suppose. Whatever, they give the reader an immediate reaction of horror, mitigated by a laugh. They are ridiculous situations as the cartoonists present them, yet the same situations would be horrible in real life.
In the current Kanin cartoon the situation is horrible, but as far over that line as it is, I've got to admit the caption is pretty funny...in a mordant and morbid way, that is.
The June 8 & 15 double issue of The New Yorker devotes several pages to the important new book by R. Crumb, The Book of Genesis. Crumb has been important to me since the 1960s when I first saw his artwork, and I've followed his career ever since.
Click on the pictures to make them bigger. Crumb drew Genesis in a cottage in the south of France, where he now lives with his wife and family. He decided to forego his usual satiric style and do the book straight. There is a warning that adult supervision should be used for children who read it. Based on the nudity alone in the New Yorker preview I'd say it's appropriate. Or is it? Why not let kids see an uncensored version of the Bible. Kids are shown publumized versions of the Bible, which has a tendency to reduce critical thinking.
That's a small quibble, though, because it's what people expect when they see images of God. Crumb will be taking enough heat for his particular way of looking at the Bible. You start talking religion, you make enemies, and he'll have a few of them spitting brimstone while they stone him in absentia. Unreligious as I am I'll be looking for a copy of The Book of Genesis for myself.
One of Crumb's heroes--maybe his biggest hero--is Mad creator Harvey Kurtzman. Yesterday I got The Art of Harvey Kurtzman, the Mad Genius of Comics, from my brother.
Kurtzman is one of my heroes, too. Along with other comedic geniuses like TV's Sid Caesar, radio and recording artists Stan Freberg and Bob and Ray, Kurtzman set the tone in the early 1950s for what became the comedy of the last half of the Twentieth Century and into the Twenty-First. Kurtzman was himself an artist, but employed other artists who carried out his visions. Despite being over 55 years old now, the early Mad, which was a 10¢ comic book until 1955, was extremely popular and influenced many young people who went on to become the comedians of the 1960s and 1970s. Mad readers created Saturday Night Live and the shows we consider to be the standards of comedy now. After 1955 Kurtzman left Mad and went on to other endeavors, but he kept his high standards all the rest of his life.
A quick visit to the grocery store for a couple of necessities required standing in a long checkout line, looking at magazines with stories about Jon and Kate. Their reality show, Jon & Kate Plus Eight, about their life with one set of twins and one of sextuplets, is a big hit on cable TV. But putting a spotlight on Jon and Kate has led to some discussion about their marital fidelity. It goes against their wholesome family image, but I'm sure their ratings are boosted by all of the tabloid scandal.
In spite of their high profile and need for attention they seem to thrive on this sort of negative publicity, while protesting that none of it is true. Uh-huh. Like there aren't groupies out there ready to pounce on attractive people who star on TV. Maybe being around all those kids is so stressful they need to let off a little steam, heh-heh.
A more bizarre couple is Dog the Bounty Hunter and his corpulent mate, Beth. I watched this show a few times some years ago and watched it again the other night. It's in its sixth season. Dog, who is in reality Duane Chapman, has a leathery face that looks like a road map, and a long mullet hairstyle. He's a tough guy who goes after bail jumpers. The thing that mitigates the hardass image is the prayer he gives before going out to hunt down the bail jumpers. When he and his posse catch them they give lectures about walking a straight and narrow path. Huggy-time follows, when they send the malefactors off to jail after a big squeeze. Puh-lease, people. Talk about a need for attention.
Beth acts sexy and has major cleavage. With those humongous boobs, the cleavage is like looking into the Grand Canyon. She wears high heels, and you wonder how she balances on them with those heavy jugs pointing into the next block. Beth talks like a hick. The show I saw the other night had her clearing her kiddies out of the driveway, and her instructions to take the puppies so they wouldn't get "runned over." She also "seen" a guy. Dog talks better, but the whole group looks like a biker gang.
I don't make a habit of watching reality TV shows. I don't think they're anything near reality because that would only be true if people didn't know there was a camera on them all the time. I'd like to see Dog when the camera isn't rolling, and what he says or does to the bail jumpers then. I'll bet rather than hugs, more than a few of them have had his pointy-toed cowboy boots deeply embedded in their rectums.
The only reality show I ever liked with any regularity was Cops, which has been around since the 1980s. It's seen a whole generation of stupid people get busted and allow their faces to be shown on TV. See, that's the thing. People will do anything to get on TV. I saw a man on Cops once who was busted getting oral sex from a skanky, toothless prostitute. To look at her methamphetamine-face, all scabby and drawn tight over her skull, was to make you want to heave. Both of them signed the release forms that allowed the producers of Cops to broadcast their faces. That show aired originally over a decade ago but is still in reruns, so anytime the guy walks down the street someone can come up to him and say, "Hey, I saw you on Cops with that ugly ho. What's up with that, man?" But of course, protecting one's dignity, even in the midst of even the most egregious acts, doesn't seem to occur to Jon and Kate, Dog the Bounty Hunter, or the dumbasses on Cops who get busted on camera.
A quiet night. Wife is gone taking care of her brother's pets, I'm home channel surfing, hoping that no matter the evidence to the contrary, there is something worth watching on television. I am struck by the synopsis of an episode of Nash Bridges on Universal HD, which describes a "paranoid man" who kills people talking on cell phones. That sounds intriguing!
I'm also aware of the tone of this now defunct show, even though I don't think I've ever watched an episode. It's a Don Johnson show, after all. It doesn't challenge anyone's intellect. In this episode the "paranoid" is spotted clearly. He's the guy in the watch cap, holding his hands over his ears as people talk on their phones. He takes out his gun, pow, he kills a man for talking.
We see him later in his basement apartment. He has completely covered it with aluminum foil, floor, walls, ceiling; the cell phone he took off his victim is wrapped in foil. He puts the phone in a foil-covered box and throws it in the water by the bay.
The problem with a program like this is how mentally ill people are treated by the writers. They're either played for laughs or held in disgust. In shows like this all mentally ill people are dangerous, capable of killing. They perpetuate a stereotype that organizations like NAMI (National Association for the Mentally Ill) have spent years trying to change. As we find out, the killer has a brain tumor. A surgeon removed most of it, but it's still growing, and the paranoid man won't take his medications.
Paranoia is something I've lived around it all my life. I can be as paranoid as anyone when the circumstances warrant, but none of the paranoids I've lived with, worked with or known have ever taken a gun and killed anyone. It has happened with others, but it's fairly rare, and not with anyone I know. The stereotype is, of course, that anyone with mental illness is dangerous, capable of killing. Nash Bridges, doing his best Jack Lord Hawaii 5-0 imitation, wants someone to check out all released mental patients from the past six months. Hey, good luck on that, Nash. But, this is a TV show where commands like that can be acted upon immediately. One of his assistants tells him, "Nothing showing up on the crazy radar."
Nash and his buddy go to the paranoid tinfoil tumor-man's doctor and in violation of doctor-patient privilege he spills the beans on everything wrong with the guy, which helps them run him down. Of course at the end Nash saves the day by disarming the paranoid man.
During the Vietnam War there was a stereotype of a returning soldier who has snapped, and has come home a walking time bomb, a homicidal psycho. The fictitious image was so potent some people believed all soldiers returning from the war were like that. I'm sure it didn't help any of these men who did have mental problems, like post traumatic stress disorder, to know that people were thinking they were apt to go out on a killing spree.
Some time ago I found this public service ad in a comic book, vintage 1951. (Click on it to make it bigger.)
It seems so far advanced for its time, when mental health was still in something of a voodoo stage, an era psychiatrists thought homosexuality, for instance, was mental illness. In those days having a person in your family who was mentally ill was a stigma; the sick were hidden away. It was possible for family members to have grandma or mom committed to a mental institution just on their say-so. The image of the illness came mostly from pop culture, movies of drooling "crazy people" in padded cells.
I'm surprised by this decades-old PSA, and its message of accepting of mental illness as just that, an illness. Apparently its call for empathy and understanding probably didn't do much good, because nearly 60 years after it was originally published the same old ugly stereotypes still accompany mental illness.
Walt White gets himself into the worst messes. So far he's been able to extricate himself with a combination of lying and dumb luck. The messes don't come about because he's not smart, far from it. Walt is a high school chemistry teacher, and he knows his business.
Walt has a nice family: a wife, Skyler, a 15-year-old son, Walt Jr., who has cerebral palsy, and a newborn baby girl.
Walt also has lung cancer and has about 18 months to live. Fortunately, Walt has been undergoing treatment and the tumor has shrunk considerably, but the treatments are costing a lot of money. Walt is paying the bills in cash. Did I mention that Walt cooks methamphetamine, and uses the alias "Heisenberg"? His family doesn't know that Walt is manufacturing drugs and selling them with a young dope entrepreneur, a former student of Walt's named Jesse. And that's where Walt seems to get into the messes.
For instance, Walt and Jesse were doing business with Tuco, a Mexican drug dealer who orders up huge quantities of their meth. But Tuco is psycho. He kills one of his own crew in front of Walt and Jesse. Later Tuco kidnaps both Walt and Jesse and holds them in his uncle's house in the middle of the New Mexico desert. Due to blind luck and an intersession by a DEA agent, who kills Tuco, Walt and Jesse are able to slip away and escape.
Did I also mention that the DEA agent is Walt's brother-in-law, Hank, who is looking for "Heisenberg"?
Then there's the matter of the lying. Walt's wife suspects he has another cell phone (he does) and he keeps denying it. Eventually she's had enough of the lies, takes her baby and leaves him.
Before that Jesse takes up with his young landlady, Jane, a junkie who overdoses and dies in Jesse's bed. Her father, an air traffic controller, is so distraught that his distraction causes two airplanes to collide in mid-air, over Walt's house.
This is the AMCtv show, Breaking Bad, with Bryan Cranston as the anti-hero Walt "Heisenberg" White. Walt's reason for cooking the meth is that he's trying to earn money for his family, so when he dies they'll have something. The problem is that he has to lie to those closest to him, and he has to depend on unreliable people like Jesse.
Walt is amoral, which makes for a conflicted hero. On the one hand Walt wouldn't have an extramarital affair--something his wife suspects, else why would be need another cell phone?--but despite being a faithful husband, he doesn't lift a finger to help Jane, the young junkie, who chokes on her own vomit and dies.
That act of omission by Walt leads to the airplanes colliding in air as Walt watches. He doesn't realize, but indirectly he bears responsibility for many people dying in that crash.
The show doesn't spare anyone in its depiction of meth junkies as scabby-faced, toothless zombies.
Did I mention that Walt is set up with a crooked lawyer who is now laundering Walt's money?
The show presents several dilemmas for the viewer, not the least of which is that they find themselves rooting for the criminals, Walt and Jesse, to get out of their messes and to eventually win. The other is that the viewer really likes Skyler and Walt Jr., and wants them to win, too.
Unfortunately, with Breaking Bad, there don't seem to be any clear winners. Just conflict and an ever deepening hole that Walt finds himself in. We wouldn't care so much if the story wasn't compelling and the acting topnotch.
Poor Whitepaws. He gets snarls and tangles in his fur and he can't stand them.
Whitepaws is a feral cat we've taken responsibility for. Whitepaw's mama, appropriately called Mamacat, and another cat we suspect may be a brother, Ramses, show up twice a day for meals and we dutifully feed them. We provide a little house for them under our deck, where they can sleep on cold winter nights. It's during winter that Whitepaws gets knots in his fur. This time of year he starts to go after them, pulling and tugging until he's pulled the fur away from his body.
This morning a big section of his coat was hanging off, so Sally took scissors and cut it off. That's not a wound on his side, it's just cat skin under the fur.
Here's the chunk of fur that she cut off.
Here I am wearing the fur.
Not bad, eh? I could tint my hair to match it and be one of those older guys who insist on wearing ponytails. I guess there's nothing wrong with that...if you don't have to go to all the trouble to grow it, that is.
It's hard to believe it's the last day of school. Again.
I had 12 years of last days when I went to public school, and then 32 of them when I worked for the school district. I never got used to that day because it was always so hectic. I don't know who was happier for the kids to go home, the kids or the teachers. I suspect the latter.
Kids have an idea that it's going to be a real fun summer, full of swimming, biking, games, activities, even a summer vacation with mom and dad. Yippee. I used to think that, too. I probably got it from watching "Spin and Marty" on The Mickey Mouse Club. Those boys were at a summer camp where they rode horses and did fun things, even solved mysteries. What usually happened was that my friends would go out of town or they'd live too far away to play with them, so I'd end up sitting in the house watching TV or reading comic books like Little Lulu and Tubby At Summer Camp, and live my life vicariously with imaginary friends. It's been ever thus.
I dreaded the last week of school because the kids were so hyper. The little kids can be distracted by field trips and activities, but the junior high kids are full of mischief. I had to watch out I didn't get bombed by shaving cream on the last day. The high school kids are dangerous. They're driving, talking or texting on their cell phones, and generally not paying attention.
Even the faculty can be out of control. One year I drove into the parking lot of a school and the principal, who was standing by the entrance to the lot, shot me in the face with a high pressure water pistol. Right in the face. I came this close--picture my thumb and index finger about 1/8" apart--to turning him in but I got talked out of it. I'm still pissed off about it, though, even ten years later.
The school secretaries will be in the buildings for a couple more weeks closing out the books.
One of my teacher friends is heading out with her family tomorrow morning. If you went to our airport tomorrow half the people there would be kids or educators heading out of town.
This is the first year since 1976 I've missed a last day of school. I had a notion to drop in at one of the schools on my former route just to relive some of the experience, but naw...I've already been there, done that.
What your teacher would like you to think about this summer:
