The smart set

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.

Fighting the wars

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 Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

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.

The meal is free, but the waiting will cost you...

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.

A coming home Veterans Day

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.

Tuesday museday

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.

Redneck rockin'

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.

Chas Addams 13

Winter is pushing its way into my neighborhood, and I'm feeling about as gray and dark as the clouds over my head. To celebrate the Halloween just past I dug out the 1943 book, Drawn and Quartered by Chas Addams. Nothing like some cheery black humor from the master to bring a little color into my life...

Boil those yeggs hard

Manning is fighting for his life. He and a killer with a gun are going at it, street fighting on the deck of a boat, in a desperate struggle to kill the other. They're in the Gulf of Mexico on the Ballerina, a 37-foot sailboat. They both fall overboard, sinking into the water, still fighting. Manning breaks free and goes to the surface, thinking his enemy, Barclay, has drowned. He watches helplessly as The Ballerina drifts away from him.

Then, as described by Charles Williams in his 1955 book, Gulf Coast Girl, Manning tells his story:

I had forgotten about Barclay.

He came to the surface of the sea forty yards away. He was drowning--drowning in a waterlogged tweed jacket with a gun in his hand as if he would no more have parted with either of them than he would have condescended to notice the existence of the Gulf of Mexico when he was busy trying to kill me. I forgot even to be afraid, watching him. It was fantastic.

He would go under. The gun would reappear first, held above his head, and then his face; the broken jaw agape and water running out of his mouth. He would calmly tilt the gun barrel down to let the water run out so it wouldn't explode when he fired, and then he'd shoot. His aim was wild because of his exertions to keep himself afloat long enough to fire. The bullet would ricochet off a swell and go screaming into the blue emptiness behind me, and the ejected shell would whistle into the water on his right. He would go under. And then fight his way back to the surface to do it all over again. There was something utterly magnificent about it, and I didn't hate him any more. I forgot I was the one he was shooting at.

He shot three more times. The fourth time he didn't quite make it. The gun came up out of the water and then sank back and there was an explosion just under the surface as he pulled the trigger while it was submerged. He never came up again.

I was alone now. I looked around. The Ballerina was far out on the horizon, still going away.

Williams had a way with visual writing. The scene reads like a movie scenario. It's fitting, because for a time he also wrote screenplays.

Charles Williams wrote hard-boiled novels. Gulf Coast Girl, the re-named paperback edition, called Scorpion Reef in its hardcover appearance, contains all of the noir elements of the genre. It has a tough hero, it has a beautiful woman with a secret and a dead husband. It has a couple of killers who are looking for a plane downed in the Gulf, carrying $750,000 worth of diamonds. It doesn't need a lot of characters, because the plot is kept simple. It's the characters we care about.

Several American writers of the hard-boiled/noir school are idolized in Europe, like Williams now barely known in the U.S. where they wrote and published. The novels are symbolic of an American culture that exists below the surface, and Americans, like lone characters from the Wild West, who favor direct action. It's a shame a novel like Gulf Coast Girl is not in print today. Very few of Williams' works are still in print and available in the U.S.

There's a Wikipedia article on Williams, biography and bibliography. According to the article, Williams was born in 1909, and died a suicide in 1975.

Hubba-hubba part 5

Some time ago in this blog I complained that the expression, "hubba-hubba," appears to have disappeared from the lexicon of males referring to females. It might not be cool because of sexual harassment, but I do a silent "hubba-hubba" whenever a foxy babe crosses my path. What she can't hear won't hurt me.

So here are some women I think deserve a "hubba-hubba", silent or otherwise, to show that I approve mightily of their pulchritude.

Here's a big hubba-hubba to girls with huge...eyes.



Hey, a Sarah Palin lookalike. Now this is a Sarah Palin I could get behind. Or in front of. Hubba-hubba.

Hubba-hubba to a rein-dear who makes me jingle my bells for Christmas.

"Hubba-hubba to Norma Jeane, partly dressed for Halloween."


Hubba-hubba to this old-time corset cutie. (Visit the fun, sexy and informative Gimcrack Hospital blog, and check in with Nurse Myra who looks terrific in a corset.)

Hubba-hubba to the sultry 1960s pin-up girl in her lingerie and big hair. (But shouldn't that headline be "Naughty Nora's Nylons" and not "Nora's Naughty Nylons"?)

Finally, Mick's daughter, Georgia May, a hubba-hubba honkytonk woman!


More hubba-hubba postings, here, here, here and here.

Living off the fat of the land

On the local morning news I saw a contestant from The Biggest Loser TV show (sorry, I didn't catch her name), answer questions from viewers about the Biggest Loser Ranch. I don't watch the show but am aware of it so I watched her with some interest. According to her interviewer, the lady is within 19 pounds of her goal. She told the viewers that when she was at the Biggest Loser Ranch they work out six hours a day, three with the trainers, and do a lot of walking. She's now off the show, but still does four hours a day working out, and runs for two hours! Whew. I grew exhausted just listening to that.

If you need to lose weight, the old tried-and-true is the best way: eat less, exercise more.

For many years, and to the delight of many purveyors of weight loss methods, diets, pills and nostrums, most people opt to take an easy way. I don't think anyone ever lost money marketing quick weight loss, based on the number of companies that have used that in their advertising. Notice the headlines in these ads from the early 1950s. One promises you'll CHEW CHEWING GUM, REDUCE. It's Kelpidine gum, made of fucus (sounds like mucus but it's a seaweed). Some people still swear by this product. Read this testimonial by a doctor in India My Unforgettable Cases. He helped an overweight young woman find love and a husband! Doc, you rock.

The other ad is the old "eat something before a meal and curb your hunger." For some people that would mean eating a double cheeseburger before dinner, but here it's a product called Meltabs. My personal feeling about that is why not skip the Meltab, have a glass of water instead? It does the same thing.


An article from The Philadelphia Inquirer October 18, 2010 was headlined, "At 79, he nibbles and noshes his way to health." It tells of Bob Kay, who eats up to 20 times a day, but he's foresworn traditional meals, and does what he calls nibbling or grazing, where he may eat some nuts or a fruit. As the article states, "Actually, Kay is more than surviving: he's thriving. Since becoming a nibbler, Kay has shed 25 pounds, His current weight: a trim 152 (maintained in part by four or five half-hour sessions at the gym each week). The article goes on to explain that Bob's blood pressure has dropped, then gives his regimen of "nibbling, noshing and grazing."

If you'd like to read more about Bob's great diet, see nibbling and noshing. I did notice that part about "four or five half-hour sessions at the gym each week," which means just what I said above, "eat less, exercise more."

If it wasn't bad enough that people feel bad about being overweight, some also feel bad about being underweight.

Can't everybody just accept themselves? Apparently not, and it makes the supplement manufacturers happy. I think we should all just think of the old saying: "For skinny people: don't eat fast. For fat people: don't eat...fast!"

Heads you lose

To kill some time yesterday before a game on TV, I watched a two week old episode of CSI. I think the show goes out of its way with violence and gore, and I'm used to it. But even I sat up and took notice of the initial scene, a decapitated body strung up on a barbed wire fence. For the sake of illustration I took my Canon and caught the very moment. In the show it went so fast, a couple of seconds, that it made mostly an impression. The viewer is left with, "Did I just see what I thought I saw?" In its own way, as Grand Guignol, it's brilliant work by the special effects people who make realistic dead bodies for the show.

It is Halloween week but on some TV shows that spirit lives every week. Sometimes it gets morbid, but sometimes funny. The ghoulish scene of the pathologist pulling the head off a fence post was over the top, but also funny in a demented way.

Decapitation is one of those things that terrified me, even as a kid, and it's all because of this character, and Walt Disney.

When I was ten, about 1957, the Disneyland TV program showed The Legend Of Sleepy Hollow. It was in black and white, interrupted by commercials, but I thought it was the scariest thing I had ever seen. The idea of being chased through the dark woods by a man with no head was too much for me. As I've told people before when telling the story, "I didn't sleep for the next couple of years." When Dad asked me what my problem was, lying in my bed, under the covers, whimpering, I told him. He said, "That damn Walt Disney. He's scared more kids than Frankenstein and Dracula." I had a nightmare once of the Headless Horseman being outside my bedroom window. Whew. Shudder.

In 1959 I saw The Legend Of Sleepy Hollow on a theatrical re-release and instead of being scared, I laughed because the cartoon is very, very funny. Even the scenes with the Headless Horseman are funny. So, my bogeyman, the decapitated Headless Horseman, was no more.

Decapitation is used as a method of execution, and there are a lot of pictures floating around the World Wide Web of real headless bodies. And bodiless heads. I'll spare you looking at them; I saw many of them yesterday when I was doing some research for this blog. You can find them by googling decapitation if you're that curious. You've been warned.

Speaking of bodiless heads, here's a picture I swiped from Hairy Green Eyeball blog, taken from an old monster magazine. It reminds me of the animated series, Futurama, with Nixon's head kept alive in the future.

A headless man was used on the cover of this classic children's book, The Man Who Lost His Head. Maybe I'm lucky, considering my story of the Headless Horseman, I didn't see this 1942 book when I was a kid.

There's also this infamous cover of a 1954 comic book, Crime SuspenStories.

It was used in a Senate investigation into juvenile delinquency. The publisher of EC Comics, William M. Gaines, who went on to publish Mad magazine, was questioned by the Senate panel. Gaines said his horror comics had covers that were "in good taste." A senator held up this comic and asked, "Do you consider this in good taste?" to which Gaines replied that for a horror comic, yes. He went on to say they could have shown a more graphic scene of the neck dripping blood. But the hearings, being televised, had done their damage. The cover, with its decapitated head, was shown on television to a horrified nationwide audience.

As the wise man said, "Keep your head, even when all about you are losing theirs."