Putting your best feet forward

While on my mail delivery route Friday I stopped at a bakery for a scone and coffee. I was the only customer except for a teenage girl sitting at a table, eating a pastry, drinking coffee, and talking to the teenage clerk behind the counter.

The counter girl had to make the coffee for me, and as she was preparing the coffeemaker a steady stream of customers came in. Most them were women, almost all young, but a couple of matures. I noticed that each of them, without exception, were wearing sandals, and with the exception of a couple, flip-flop sandals. When I was the Army we called flip-flops shower shoes because we wore them when taking a shower, so as not to get athlete’s foot or some other kind of noxious fungus. I never thought they were very practical; they might’ve been OK for the reason the Army gave, but not for everyday wear. There’s just no support.

Still, it gives a guy like me who likes to look at pretty feet a chance to gawk a little. Most people aren’t very stirred up by feet, no matter how pretty. I always wonder, why then do women go to the trouble and expense to paint their toenails, or to have a pedicure? Since the bakery was in the middle of an affluent neighborhood, most of the women in their flip flops had pedicures.

A man and his wife, who appeared to be in my age group, gave their order and then stood to the side so other customers could order. The teenage girl who was the sole customer in the store when I came in stood up and turned her back to look at something. She was wearing a sweatshirt that was printed on the back:

Sex

Crazed

Underwater

Bad

Ass

An acronym for SCUBA. The mature man and his wife saw the shirt. The girl sat down again. The man looked at me with an expression that seemed to say, “These young people nowadays…”

“Yep,” was a look I gave back.

If the girl had been in school she would have been ordered to remove the shirt, but she could wear it all she wanted outside of school. I wonder if her mom knows she left the house in that shirt? She was blonde, slim, very pretty, real all-American, and yes, she had a pedicure and pretty feet. The message and its tone of sexuality and badness on the back didn’t match the girl from the front.

Warped rotors and rubber lips

It's been a hectic week, and it's only Wednesday. Yesterday I had the rotors on my 2005 Ford Escape machined because the fronts were warped. When I braked I got a vibration. No, Brian Wilson, it wasn't a good vibration, either.

After plunking down $420 for rotor grinding, new brake pads all around and a 4-wheel alignment I headed in my now no-vibration car for the dentist. I had his fingers and drill in my mouth for the better part of an hour. I was too disheartened to ask what all of that cost. It's been heavy on the wallet the last few weeks. Hey, Bush, where the hell is that $1200 check you promised me? Did you forget to put a stamp on it?

On the way home I had some coffee, but had the foresight to bring a straw along because the left side of my mouth was numbed. Nothing like trying to drink hot coffee and not be able to feel your lips or tongue. You get more coffee on your shirt than in your mouth.

Later when I went to bed I fell asleep not counting sheep, but the $$$ I'd spent that day. For a guy who wants to save his money and retire within the next year it isn't easy to watch those hundred dollar bills flying away. I have the wallet snapped shut today. Let's see if it stays closed.

*******On another subject, right now in rotation on my car stereo is the CD Under the Covers Vol. 1 by Matthew Sweet and Susanna Hoffs. They do cover versions of old songs, some of them once very, very popular ("Monday, Monday," "Different Drum," shown in a live version below), and some obscure but fine songs. It's like someone took my musical tastes of the 1960s and translated them to this CD. Speaking of otherwise obscure, I especially enjoy "I See The Rain" by The Marmalade (1967) and "Alone Again Or" by Love, which blew me away when I heard it. I had the Love album in 1966 and loved it to death. Get it? I loved Love? Oh well, maybe you had to be there.

Really great versions of "And Your Bird Can Sing" and "Cinnamon Girl," too. Hey, Matthew and Susanna, since the name of this blog is Paranoia Strikes Deep, have you guys been inside my head, picking my brain for song choices? If you have, c'mon back. I've got a whole bunch for your next CD.

Different Drum, live



Cinnamon Girl, live

Uncivil discourse

Is civil discourse dead? Of course not. Even in this most heated political season the candidates seem to be trying to hold on to some civility.

George Carlin died, and civil discourse wasn't his schtick. It was more like uncivil ranting. Curmudgeon, cranky George made a living by getting on stage and complaining about things in the most hostile tones possible. He also made us laugh our collective asses off.

I thought about Carlin when I found these three cards. A friend who worked in a print shop gave them to me many years ago. They made me laugh, and nowadays I can hear them being spoken in George Carlin's voice. I wouldn't want to get one of these cards,. It would ruin my day. But there are people I encounter every day I'd love to present with one. George Carlin wouldn't have needed the cards. He'd have gotten on stage, said what they say, and we'd all have busted a gut laughing.

Transamerica

Sally orders Netflix movies online. She has such interesting taste in movies. She is always looking for something beyond the big hits. The other day we received Transamerica, starring Felicity Huffman as Bree, a man in the midst of transgender reorientation; trying to talk in the voice of a woman, trying to act like a woman, while still hauling around a penis. She bails her son out of jail in New York City. A son she didn't know she had, conceived during a moment with a woman she knew in college. It's a road trip movie, as they make their way from NYC to LA, hence the punning title, Transamerica.

Bree's son, Toby, played by Kevin Zegers, is a jerk. He's a street hustler, druggy, who has sex with men for money. It's the son's "goal" to be in porno movies. Toward the end of Transamerica he's shown "acting" in a gay porn movie.*

We find during their time together that despite her life choices Bree is a very conservative person who doesn't approve of Toby's choices. It was billed in theaters as a comedy. There are some funny situations growing out of the story, but it's not a comedy in the sense of the Adam Sandler-definition. I found out about deep stealth, which is when transgendered people hide in their new roles, not letting the world know they are going through sexual reassignment. Because of her conservatism Bree is extremely paranoid she'll be outed. She is, when the boy sees her penis while she's urinating, and also in a restaurant when an intuitive 8-year-old points her out.

All of the actors in this film are excellent, but Huffman has to carry the movie. It's her credibility that is at stake. If we don't accept that she is a man trying to become a woman then the movie would just be a joke, a caricature. Huffman is a fine actor and I bought in completely.

There are some nude scenes. I thought the nude scenes of young men seemed on the verge of porn themselves, a near-fantasy of two young guys swimming nude while Bree looks on. The porn movie sequence, and a scene where the boy sees Huffman's penis. It's shown at a distance but it must've given the actress a giggle to wear such an appliance. Huffman also appears completely nude in a bathtub scene, after her operation, where she touches her new vagina. These scenes aren't gratuitous, but are an integral part of the plot. They earned the film an R-rating, but I don't think the movie would have been as powerful without them.

I was not surprised Huffman was nominated for an Oscar in 2005 for her role in Transamerica.


*He doesn't have an erection so a young man, a fluffer, is sent in to help him prepare. A fluffer is someone who has the duty of keeping the porn star erect through "oral stimulation." Thanks to Viagra they aren't much needed anymore. I imagine there came a point when fluffers had to go look for new jobs.

What is the job description of this position, and also what would a fluffer do when applying for a new job, answering questions on a written application?

Former job: Fluffer in movies

Describe your duties: Performed oral sex on male porn actors

Salary or hourly rate of pay: Are you kidding? I was supposed to be paid?

Do you feel you did your job well? You said a mouthful!

Some things never change

In the early '80s when both music videos and VCRs were new, I used to tape some of the music video programs that played on late night broadcast TV. They featured music I wasn't hearing on my normal radio stations. I remember this song, "Black Stations, White Stations," because--ahem--I liked the girl doing the singing. I liked her slim body and how she moved it when she was dancing.

I went on YouTube to find this video and after a few keystrokes found it not under the group name I remembered, M & M, but under Martha & the Muffins. This is an obscure video for an obscure song by an obscure '80s Canadian techno-pop group. I still like the girl, I still like her slim body, I still like her dancing. Musical styles change, but some things never do.

Happy Dad's Day

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Warren piece

Going through an old filing cabinet of mine I found this clipping from a 1992 newspaper. It's about my former coworker, Warren, and the suspicion police put on him after the disappearance of his wife.

I've told this story before, but here's the short course: I worked with Warren and his wife, Margo, in the 1980s. Warren was married with a baby daughter when he met Margo. They fell in love and he divorced his wife, marrying Margo, moving in with her and her two teenaged sons.

Warren had quit the school district where we worked and gone to work on the loading dock of a trucking company. Margo had gotten a job as head custodian at a junior high school. Warren was ass-over-teakettle in love with his wife, and because he did shift work would visit her at work quite often (irking the staff, too). One day in February, 1992, Margo disappeared, a search was mounted, but she wasn't found. A few months later a father and son, hunting in the desert west of Salt Lake City, found some human remains, all that was left of Margo.

During the time of the search and afterward Warren was the main "person of interest" to the police. A couple of years later a man confessed to killing Margo and two teenage girls, who he had buried on his uncle's pig farm.

Here's what bothers me about this case, and it's an object lesson for us all: if your spouse disappears, better make sure you have a rock solid alibi. Better make sure you have a half dozen witnesses who can testify to your whereabouts, or are seen on a surveillance camera somewhere to prove you were somewhere else when the spouse went missing. Better make sure you don't make any cell phone calls that can be interpreted as hiring a hit man. Some of this I learned on CSI, Forensic Files and Law and Order, but a lot of it I realized after closely following the Warren and Margo case. When the cops lock onto someone they think is guilty, they shake him like a dog shakes a rat. This blog ain't called Paranoia Strikes Deep for nothing. The way cops think will make you paranoid.

That a couple of teenaged girls had gone missing the same time as Margo didn't seem pertinent to the police. What the killer later confessed was that he had gone into the junior high school on that February morning looking for a junior high girl to kidnap and kill. Margo, who was a petite, pretty blonde woman, fit the size requirements.

Warren had a lot of flaws to his character. We fellow workers thought he was immature, a blowhard and braggart, an adulterer, and he was also a liar. "Liar" describes most of the rest of us, too. We've all lied to keep ourselves out of trouble. Warren passed two lie detector tests, yet the cops still thought he was their man. We others knew when Warren lied he was so bad at it he always got caught. He just wasn't that smart. So if he got caught lying about something minor he'd done at work and couldn't get away with it, how could be get away with lying about his wife's disappearance and murder?

Margo's killer spent years in the court system, was sentenced to death but beat the lethal injection by dying of a bowel obstruction. He was eating his court papers. He would have gone free forever had he not come forward and confessed, because the cops were so sure Warren did in his wife they were blinded to any other possibilities.

In the still of the night this boy is leaving on that midnight train to Georgia

The Five Satins were one of those vanguard groups of rock music, coming along with a doo-wop classic, "In the Still of the Night." Check out the movements. They'd segue into the Beatles, doing their own ballad, "This Boy." Crammed together, no moving around, but close vocal harmony. Can anyone ever believe how versatile the Beatles were? John Lennon went from this to "A Day In The Life," in just a couple of years.

Finally, the sublime Gladys Knight, and her famous Pips, show what slickness there was in the Motown hit factory. While the Five Satins look a little restrained, the Pips show the stuff that made them famous! Love that woo-woo! The total package. Gladys Knight joined the Mormon church and her bishop once said, "We're the only Mormon ward with 'Midnight Train to Georgia' in our hymnbook."

In The Still of The Night

 

This Boy 

 

 Midnight Train To Georgia

 

Big rat

My wife, Sally, has been in Pennsylvania since last Wednesday, staying with our son, David and his family. I mean extended family. David is one male along with six females, with the addition of his mother. Two of the females are his daughters. He must feel overwhelmed. Sally has been keep me updated on the goings-on. Our granddaughters are Bella, age 3 ½, and Gabby, almost two.

David and I took the girls to Chuck E Cheese last night for dinner. They were really excited until Chuck E Cheese showed up....this great big rat walking around waving at the kids, etc. All of a sudden when he headed toward us both girls started shrieking and Bella started climbing up me. It was so funny! He could see they were afraid, so he didn't come near again, but from a distance, he waved at them, and the shrieking started again! I guess if I was a little girl and a big rat all of a sudden was standing in front of me, I'd shriek, too! Bella showed a lot of dexterity when it came to playing a miniature air hockey game. She was surprisingly good and kept beating both David and I. When she got the puck in the hole, she'd jump up and down and we'd praise her. It was so cute! Now Gabby, on the other hand, was content just trying to pick up the puck and place it in the hole and retrieve it. That was the only game they liked. Later we walked down to the end of the mall and there was a really cool play area for young children. The girls liked the little playhouse the best, where Bella washed her hands, gave Gabby a bath and baked cookies.

Love, Sally

p.s. I've attached a few cute pix of the girls. Some are from our visit to the zoo.
We saw a family of Amish and tried to secretly take some pictures. That was interesting! One of the guys wasn't only Amish, but a dwarf, too! (if that's the politically right word to describe him) He really stood out!

*******

Yesterday I went to Wal-Mart for an oil change. For my car, not me. Yuk-yuk.

As I waited for the oil change I looked around a little bit to see what new goods our Chinese brethren were making us for 75¢ an hour. I went to the in-store office of my credit union, where I withdrew some cash. Finally, to kill even more time I went to the in-store McDonald's where I had a cup of coffee.

As I waited in line for my order I noticed people glancing over at me. As I walked to a table a young Mexican woman, sitting with her two children, smiled at me. I thought, ah, I've still got the old charm (operative word being "old".) Later as I sipped my coffee I noticed the same young woman at the counter, talking to a friend who worked behind the counter. They were speaking in Spanish, and they looked at me, then quickly looked away when they saw that I'd seen them. To tell the truth, I didn't think a lot of it. I got paged to go pick up my car, and that was a whole other adventure, since the clerk couldn't figure out where the Debit button was on the cash register. He had to go find help, leaving me with the store greeter, the old man who says, "Welcome to Wal-Mart," who proceeded to tell me how dumb all of the employees in that shop are. It all got figured out eventually and I went home.

Later on I was in the bathroom and looked in the mirror. I saw that my t-shirt was on inside out. My label was sticking out for all the world to see. I was exposing my Fruit Of The Loom! Good lord…no wonder everyone was looking. Too late to crawl under a rock and be ashamed, so I just put the shirt on the right way and went out into my yard to mow the lawn. C'est la vie.

Old School American Idols

This morning I'm home. I turned on the Today Show to hear Scott McClellan, former White House Press Secretary, explain why he is dissing his old boss--like that's hard--and I also saw the American Idols, Archuleta and Cook.

All three of those guys can sing! Well, McClellan sang only in a manner of speaking, but the two young Davids actually have good voices, good for the material they choose.

But if you want to talk about good voices, you go back over 50 years to The Platters. I used to listen to this music on the radio, but it was all over the place and I couldn't appreciate it like I can now. You look at the presence this group had, their harmonies, the outstanding lead vocal. This is Old School music at its best, great doo wop, great ballads.

Iron Sky

My friend Karswell sent me this video teaser for a new Internet movie that is coming to a computer monitor near you.



Intriguing teaser, wot? It is nothing like, but reminds me of a novel, Vengeance 10 by Joe Poyer, published in 1980. Americans land on the moon only to find a Nazi rocket of the V-class, crashed on the moon with a man inside.

Not only do we have Vengeance 10, we have Space Western, a comic from 1953 featuring Spurs Jackson, a cowpoke on Mars, battling Nazis who escaped to the Red Planet after the war.

Considering we got into space using the work of scientists who had been working for the Nazis during World War II it seems only natural to be entertained by stories like these.

R-A-G-G-M-O-P-P

Like more than a few other people I watched the finale this week of American Idol, the only actual time I've watched the program from beginning to end. I fed into the hype and I guess it's what passes for entertainment in 2008.

In 1953 The Treniers, led by twin brothers Claude and Cliff Trenier, appeared on national TV with their jump and jive, r&b, and pre-rock era rock 'n' roll. My dad used to sing their song "Ragg Mopp" to us while we'd be in his car (no radio, so Dad filled in). I can't help but wonder how a group like this would do today. They wouldn't be on American Idol because only solo acts are featured there, but how would a group like this be presented today? Watch how they throw it to each other in the first video, "Rockin' Is Our Bizness," and watch the great dancing in "Ragg Mopp." Don't mind the nonsense lyrics. This is entertainment, any era.

Saying goodbye

Yesterday, a clear spring day, we said our final goodbyes to our mom. My brother and I both spoke; it was a short service, conducted at the grave site.

Since our mother was the last surviving family member of her generation I was happy for those who attended. Mom had outlived just about everybody. As my cousin Carolyn put it, "She was the last leaf on the tree."

Mom is under the beautiful mountains, including Mt. Olympus, overlooking Salt Lake Valley.


It was a good day to say goodbye.

Mom with my son David in 1978.

My mother's death

Mom at the Acropolis in Greece, 1969.

My brother called me just after noon yesterday, telling me that the nursing home had called him: Mom was in distress, trouble breathing, time was short and that we'd want to be with her. She'd been ill with flu over Mother's Day. There was also a problem with blood loss from another condition. As her doctor told us, her blood was so low it wasn't carrying enough oxygen to her lungs.

When I got there Mom was very pale. Options with staff were discussed, and most discarded. If they did a transfusion we'd be back next month in the same situation. The only real option was a hysterectomy and at age 86, Mom just wasn't a candidate. She was too frail and as her doctor put it, "it would kill her."

So we sat down to watch Mom die. The doctor told us that she could last up to 48 hours, maybe 24. Mom resisted having an oxygen mask. She was like that, she would get claustrophobic. At the doctor's orders, the nurses administered morphine and Ativan for Mom's anxiety, which was very high.

Within 25 minutes, not hours, Mom died. She just stopped breathing. My brother and I stopped breathing too. We waited for the gasp to show she was still alive. We watched her for a few minutes and I went to get the nurse. "I think my mother has died," I said. Sure enough, that was it. My brother said, "That is so like Mom," referring to her famous impatience. "Let's get going!" Mom, who was probably in much worse shape than could be observed by the doctor or nurses, defied their timetable and got going early.

Mom had been in the Alzheimer's nursing facility for four years, since she broke her hip during a hospital visit for a blood clot in her leg. None of us thought she'd survive past the first month or so, but she not only survived, she thrived. She liked being around people, and she loved just sitting in her wheelchair while the activity went on around her. They took great care of her, but the person who is the most heroic in all this is my brother, Rob, who visited her every day, and attended to everything she needed. There aren't many people in the world who are like Rob. I'm counting myself amongst those who couldn't do what he did. He quipped, "This place is my social life." There will be a sense of loss for Rob. It was obvious to me that for him it wasn't an obligation, but something he liked to do; not just duty, but a purpose.

Mom hadn't spoken coherently in a few years. You could see that the words were trying to come out, but only once in a great while could very short sentences be understood. I had not heard her say my name in years, at least since she had been in the facility. Yesterday afternoon when I walked into her room and she saw me, she looked at me and said my name. As simple a thing as it may seem, it was astounding to me, and I will carry that memory with me.

Mom in 2006.

Send Grover right over!

Normally I wouldn't discuss something so personal, but we're all friends here, right?

Yesterday I went to a new dermatologist. I try to visit my dermatologist once a year and have him give me the once over, make sure I don’t have anything cancerous on my skin. I'm in the sun a lot. My regular doc had a stroke a couple of years ago. I went to a new dermatologist last summer, and she was such a babe I told my wife I wasn't going back. It's too intimidating having a beautiful woman looking at my zits, warts and moles. At a friend's recommendation I switched to Dr. W., who is male. Among other things my friend--who is a woman--said, "He's really funny and he's short." I don't know what that has to do with anything, but it's the way people describe other people.

Besides wanting to get checked out for skin cancer I recently developed a rash on my shoulders and lower back. I tried various over-the-counter products but nothing worked. My new dermatologist stepped into the examining room, and not only is he not short, he towers over me. No problem having him look at my scalp, which he did just by looking down. The rash he took one look at and said, "It's transient acantholytic dermatosis. It occurs mainly in men over 55." I remembered my friend describing him as funny, but that didn't sound funny to me. He gave me a prescription for a steroid cream and was out of the office like he was running a marathon. Considering how many people were in his office and how fast he was getting through them maybe every day is like a footrace for Dr. W.

I came home to a phone call from Sally telling me she had landed safely in Portland, Oregon, and she and her friends were off to lunch and to have some fun. I told her my story and added, "Dr. W. is as handsome a young guy as Dr. S. is a beautiful woman." That was because she'd given me a hard time after I told her why I didn't want to go back to the pretty lady doc.

When I came home I checked out the condition on the Internet and found out it's also called Grover's Disease. Grover's! Holy crap, that took me back to my son's childhood and his love for his furry blue Grover doll. He carried it everywhere he went. I'm guessing the Sesame Street connection might be why the doc didn't call it that. From the articles I read I found the condition goes away--after a year or two!--if not treated, but is easily treated with topical steroids. Whew. I found out the condition is brought on by sweating, which I do a lot of. In the winter it's worse, because I'm trapped in a coat, with sweatshirt over a t-shirt. There's nowhere for my sweat to go; it can't evaporate. The article told me to use baby talc.

So now I'm a talcum-powdered Grover!

(Thanks to David Miller for giving me the "blues" in this photo!)

Lemming

Lemming, 2005, in French with English subtitles. Directed and co-written by Dominick Mol.

Lemming is a movie that reminds me of the old cliché, "a mystery wrapped in an enigma." How much of the movie is a dream, how much is real? Laurent Lucas is Alain Getty, a computer hardware designer--in this case a flying webcam--who works for Richard Pollock (André Dusollier), the philandering husband of Alice, played wonderfully by the talented Charlotte Rampling. Mix in Alain's wife, Charlotte Gainsbourg as the beautiful Bénédicte, and you have the makings of a four-sided love affair.

Lucas, who looks a lot like a young Martin Landau, is the most innocent of the four until the end. Unless you count Bénédicte, who may or may not be innocent, depending on how much of a dream you think the story is. Alice and Richard arrive for dinner at the Getty's, where Alice proceeds to create an embarrassing scene over her husband's infidelities.

Later she appears at Alain's work and makes a pass at him, which he refuses. Alain's life goes downhill from there. His wife taunts him when she finds out about the pass. Alice told her, then committed suicide in the guest bedroom of the Getty's home. Alain goes to Biarritz with Richard, harangued by his boss for the pass by Alice, telling him he should have taken her up on the offer. Alain calls Bénédicte from Biarritz, only to have her tell him to "go to hell" and hang up the phone.

The "lemming" of the title is a creature found blocking the drainpipe of the sink after the disastrous dinner visit by Richard and Alice. A lemming is found only in Scandinavia, so it adds to the mystery. In the movie's only identified dream sequence, Alain arrives home from Biarritz to find Bénédicte sleeping, but can't wake her. He goes into the kitchen to find lemmings swarming all over the floor. He backs up, falls down the stairs and breaks his arm. When he wakes in hospital he finds that he had not been home, but had been in a car wreck on his way home from Biarritz. His wife tells him there was no "go to hell" phone call, nor did he come home and find lemmings. It was all a nightmare. Poor Alain. The nightmare builds, only we're not sure whether it's real or he's still trapped in his dream. He's really in for it while in the mountains with his wife at his boss's cabin. The wife coerces him into a confession of the pass by Alice, then has him call her Alice while they begin he process of making love. He wakes to find he's been deserted, and has to walk down the mountain, then hitchhike home. When he gets there Bénédicte tells him she is now with his boss, Richard. It's no wonder the poor guy is turning into a paranoid wreck!

In one of the most chilling scenes in the movie, Richard is asleep on his own couch and wakes to see a silhouette in the darkness. It's Bénédicte, who reminds him that Alice told him while making her pass at him that she wants to see her husband "croak". Bénédicte sits back in the darkness, then comes forward again into the light, only to have been replaced by Alice, who gives him the key to her house. She wants him to kill Richard, and make it look like suicide.

SPOILER WARNING! At the very first, before things start to unravel for the Gettys, as Alain arrives home he sees a scene across the street. A man is slapping his young son. It isn't revealed until the last scene why this happened, but it ties the lemming plot element together. The imdb board that discusses this movie is divided on several points, including what is a dream and what isn't. This is the way people's minds work. They've just got to know what is real. One person posits that Alice has possessed Bénédicte, but another argues there's no evidence anywhere in the movie that Alice is a ghost or a witch. And I agree. The part that is driving these reviewers crazy is that Bénédicte is in the room when Alain murders Richard, yet appears not to remember the murder later, or her affair with Richard. Did it happen? Who knows? There are some parallels to David Lynch's Mulholland Drive, maybe the most audacious movie I've ever seen for confusing a viewer. At one point all of the characters in Mulholland Drive turn into other characters, and the discussion boards on imdb are full of people trying to explain that, too.

In the case of Lemming I find it more entertaining to just let the ambiguities remain ambiguous. Whether Alain dreamed it, whether it happened, whether there was an unexplained supernatural element is less important than the total mood the movie evokes, and the tantalizing questions left in the moviegoers' minds that they get to argue endlessly over.

Lemming gets four out of five stars on the Paranoia Index.

Birthday gal Sal

It's Sally's birthday today. Happy birthday, Sal!

Tonight we go out for dinner, but before we go, thought I'd share with you some pictures of Sally: mom, grandma, wife, sweetheart, friend.

Sally at nine.
Sally at 15.
Sally at 19.
Sally at 25.
Sally at our 40th high school reunion.
Sally with our friends, Dave and Karen, in Albany, California, 2006.Sally by our granddaughter, Bella.
Sally, on my personal Most Wanted list!

Techno? Heck, no!

One thing I've had to do in the past 16 years is form an uneasy alliance with computer technology. When Sally bought our first computer, an IBM PS-2, in 1992, I had screaming fits of frustration in trying to deal with the obstinate beast. Computers were designed by engineers and people who did not look at the way things work in the real world, but how in their heads they wanted them to work, and then forced the rest of us to have to work it their way.

Here we are a decade-and-a-half later and I'm still fighting the equipment. I bought a laptop for Sally's birthday, and that was OK to set up because computers have--thank the geek gods--gotten a bit more friendly to us users. Then I bought a LinkSys wireless router. The first router crashed after two days so I took it back to Best Buy and got another. That one I had to configure three times before getting it to finally do what it's supposed to do. Last night I did the easiest thing of all, get Sally a wireless mouse. Those things are great. Pop 'em in and they start working. Hallelujah.

My latest computer woe is software related. For years, since the late '90s at least, I've used a program called CompuPic 5.2. It's an antique now, kind of a poor man's PhotoShop. As a photo editor CompuPic has been simple to use and very user friendly, until the other night when it turned on me. I usually save all my photos as JPEGs, because they take up less room and JPEG is compatible with everything, but the other night in the middle of a project I did some editing and when I saved it it turned into this:

It's some sort of digital abstraction. No matter what I did, everything I saved in JPEG format turned into this gray blob of pixels. Having obsessive-compulsive disorder puts me at a disadvantage, because I can't just shrug my shoulders and say, "Oh, well," then go on and do something using another program. I don't have another program I like as much as I like CompuPic. So I went to bed after tussling with it for an hour or more past my usual bedtime, and while I was able to fall asleep, woke up a couple of hours later with the gears in my brain spinning, working on the problem. I got back up. The simplest solution, after experimenting, is to save everything I scan as a bitmap file. CompuPic doesn't mind bitmaps. It adds a step for me, because then I go to another program I use, Paint Shop Pro, and save the bitmap as a JPEG. It's a solution only in the sense that I can make it work. As a real solution to my problem--what the hell is going on that makes CompuPic think a saved JPEG looks like the picture above?--it's unsatisfying.

Something else that socks in another gray hair is the computer's way of making you think you did something wrong, the old "fatal error" message that has sent heart attacks to unwary users when it pops up. What I've found from years of feudin', fussin' and fightin' with these recalcitrant machines is that it isn't my fault. It's the fault of some geeky engineer who designed the damn program in the first place, and whose brain doesn't work the same way a normal brain works.

(The great-looking photo of "The Personalities" is something my friend Dave Miller found in a thrift store. I'm sure this toothsome threesome put on quite a show. Anything with an accordion has just gotta be great!)

I know you're reading this blog, I can hear you breathing

My friend Eddie ran this picture of some very short people in his Chicken Fat blog. By coincidence just a few days before I had found a similar picture in an antique store. In the picture below the woman is wearing flat shoes so she doesn't appear taller than the man.

Remember elevator shoes? "Now you can be taller than her!" They put 2" lifts in the heels. They still make those shoes because guys still need to be taller than her.

Or maybe not. There's a Lowe's ad on TV right now, showing a couple entering the garden section of a Lowe's store, and the woman is half a head taller than the guy. The reason I can remember the ad and the store is because it's so jarringly noticeable. I read once that men are usually 4" taller than the women they're with. So what's wrong with shorter guys and taller women, anyway? If a woman can stand to look down on my bald spot, I can stand looking up her nostrils. Seriously, where did this start? Why is the guy supposed to be taller? OK, that's a rhetorical question. I'll never have an answer for that.

*******

This is my 300th Paranoia Strikes Deep blog, by yet another coincidence posted exactly two years to the day of my first blog. My purpose when starting this blog was to air out my personal paranoia, which I've done. I was raised by a paranoid mother, have a paranoid boss, am surrounded by paranoid coworkers, and I'm a damn paranoid, hence the name of my blog. I believe that paranoia is a survival mechanism, developed through evolution so we'll watch our backs. Some of us have a more heightened sense of it. For instance, I'd have more than 300 postings if I hadn't gotten paranoid my boss would see some of my more personal anti-boss postings, so I deleted them. They prove my point.

I knew my mother was paranoid when I was 18, came home and found her screaming into the telephone, "I know you're there! I can hear you breathing!" When I took the phone from her all I heard was a dial tone. At the time she was worried about one of my dad's business competitors tapping our phones. Why? Paranoia knows no why…"They" are just out to get us is all.

State kidnapers

Watching the disaster unfolding in Texas as the state kidnaps over 400 children and holds them hostage to some alleged phone call from an alleged 16-year-old wife of an alleged 50-year-old man--a polygamous wife, no less--is watching a whole culture come into sharp focus. Both of the polygamist group and the state showing how much power it can wield against the helpless.

As a 17-year-old in the mid-1960s I walked away from the Mormon church and I've never had cause to regret it. I can deny my early religious training but don't deny I come from a Mormon family that dates itself back to 1847 with the pioneers who arrived in Salt Lake Valley. I also live in a place where polygamists were once common. When I moved into my home in 1975 we had at least four polygamous families within a stone's throw. All but one family has left, and that family keeps itself pretty well hidden. Occasionally I see them in a local grocery store. They are the same style of polygamist you're seeing on the nightly news, women in old-fashioned long dresses with puffy hair, no makeup and tennis shoes. I don't know how many polygamists of other groups are still in the area. They don't dress that way, and blend in with the rest of the residents. One family, the infamous Kingston clan, allows their women to dress in tight clothes and show--gasp!--cleavage. They still marry off their young women to older guys, though.

This is where the FLDS, who had lived quietly for decades in the Utah-Arizona twin border towns of Hildale, Utah and Colorado City, Arizona started to come unraveled. Their prophet, Warren Jeffs, who is now serving time after being a federal fugitive, started doing what cult leaders with ultimate power do: he used his power and ruled with the iron fist of the autocrat. At one point a few years ago a few dozen teenage boys were expelled from the towns, and drifted to Salt Lake City, where they became known as the Lost Boys. They aren't to be confused with the other Lost Boys, Africans who came here after warfare destroyed their countries and families, but some of the trauma was the same. The FLDS Lost Boys were expelled because they had become a threat to the older men who desired younger wives. Warren Jeffs assigned wives to men, and if there were boys around to distract the girls, then they couldn't be completely subservient. Off went the boys into the spiritual wilderness. Jeffs began to seal his own doom with acts like those.

Jeffs doesn't look so powerful after being arrested in Nevada:

A branch of his organization, the Fundamentalist Church Of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, built a compound in Texas. They told the Texans it was a hunting compound. When the townsfolk, bible belt Christian evangelicals that they are, found out it was a Mormon fundamentalist cult group, I'm sure all hell (you'll excuse the expression) broke loose, leading up to the recent events. My wife and I really feel for the women and children in this mess. We feel bad for young women forced into marriage with older men, becoming mothers before they're 16, but we also feel the state overreacted, and is abusing its power. But then we are talking about Texas, the state that twice elected George W. Bush governor.

In my own past there are polygamists. On the top of this page is my great-great grandfather, Nathaniel Henry, who had three wives. His son, Harry, was not a polygamist, but was father to my grandmother, who idol-worshiped her own polygamous grandfather, even though she was a mainstream Mormon. After 1890 the Latter-day Saints disavowed polygamy. It was then that the splinter groups started to spring up, those who wouldn't give up on polygamy. All my young life I was told that yes, we had a polygamist heritage but no, those folks didn't exist any more. Ah, the lies we're told when we're young…

Actually, mainstream Mormons, as much as they try to distance themselves from groups like the FLDS, do believe in polygamy. They believe it will still exist in heaven. I don't think that modern mainstream Mormon wives are all that fond of the idea.

Right now we watch and wait to see how big a hole Texas is digging for itself with its actions against women and children. Texas, being a big place, can dig itself a really big hole