When They Come From Space

This is a continuation of yesterday's (June 24, 2007) blog, commemorating the 60th anniversary of the flying saucer sighting over the Cascade Mountains. It's caused interest for the past six decades.

It isn't much of a coincidence that flying saucer sightings were more numerous after World War II than before. War tends to make people hyper-sensitive. And it didn't help that our introduction to the war was by an invasion from the sky. According to some, there were UFO sightings before the war, but if there were, they must've caused no real impact. This picture purports to be from 1927. It looks fake to me. What do you say?
In 1947 especially, paranoia was rampant in America. Communism. Atom bombs. House Un-American Activities Committee. Yikes! What are we gonna do? Why, we're going to look to the skies, see if we can spot one of them there flyin' saucers. I think they're to blame.

Or they're here for benevolent reasons, or even for observation. Or they might be here for nefarious purposes, like invasion and taking over. While we worried about the commies taking over Europe, the public also got to worry about the Martians coming in and zapping our asses with ray guns. We knew how to fight the Russians. But how do you manage to fight a war with spacemen and their unknown technology?Several movies followed a theme of paranoia, but one, 1950's The Day The Earth Stood Still, showed the aliens as here in our best interest. The rest of the movies were very much about invasion from space. That wasn't anything new. H.G. Wells wrote The War Of The Worlds at the end of the 19th Century when we had even less defenses than we did after World War II.

If there's anything we're scared of, insects, global warming, serial killers or invasion from outer space, you can bet that Hollywood is there to make a movie playing on those fears. And you can bet we're going to line up at the box office, too. In 1956, Earth Vs The Flying Saucers was released. The effects were by stop-motion animation wizard Ray Harryhausen, so it's the most technically interesting of the 1950's space-invasion movies. t wasn't until Steven Spielberg's 1977 Close Encounters of the Third Kind that a really popular movie showed aliens coming in peace. The movie was very influential, but for the most part, though, when people thought of flying saucers at all they thought outer space, they thought aliens, they thought sinister purposes or impending invasion.

It also served their purposes to think that there was a big secret being hidden by our government. The government could operate outside of our interests. Our government had hidden the atom bomb until it was dropped on Japan, so why not hide the fact of outer space aliens? The government's own trend toward secrecy hasn't helped it, either. People with agendas can come forward with "official" top-secret documents or wild tales of riding in flying saucers, courtesy of the U.S. government. They might tell stories of meeting aliens living at Area 51 in the Nevada desert, and the government won't acknowledge the stories by saying if they're false or true.

That paranoid fear alone is enough to keep some people watching the skies.

More later!

Ciao for now.
The Mars Attacks cards were bubblegum collectibles in 1962, painted by illustrator Norman Saunders. They fit in perfectly with the invasion fantasy. Click on the smaller pictures for full-size images.

Happy Anniversary, Flying Saucers!

Today is the 60th anniversary of the start of the Flying Saucer Flap of the Twentieth Century. On June 24, 1947, pilot Kenneth Arnold spotted a flight of crescent-shaped objects over the Cascade Mountains of Washington. His description of their flight, "like stones skipping over water," gave some reporter the notion to create the term flying saucers. Nowadays we lump sightings like Arnold's under the overall designation of "UFO," but it's the name flying saucers that caught and held the public's imagination.

Some people have speculated that Arnold saw a flight of birds, specifically pelicans, maybe geese. I don't know. I would assume that Arnold, being a pilot and retired military, would have been a trained observer, but even trained observers can have their eyes fooled under certain conditions. I can't believe he would come forward with such a story, risking ridicule, if there was even the most remote chance what he saw was a flock of birds, but what did he see? Nobody knows, but an enterprising magazine editor named Ray Palmer saw a golden opportunity to sell magazines with stories of flying saucers. The public snapped them up, feeding into the great promotional myth-machine that is American publishing.

Do I believe in flying saucers? I'm a skeptic: in religion, governments and flying saucers. I had my own experience with a flying saucer at age 9, and now believe my childish mind was tricked by suggestion from a friend. I believe that the psychology behind flying saucer devotees keeps them hanging on to a dream that someday we'll all know the truth about UFOs, and that they'll be proved right for their long-held beliefs. As for me, well, I know there are lots of things in the skies that look like other things, so let's just say that if a flying saucer lands and little gray men get out and greet us I might be persuaded to believe. It's been 60 years and despite a lot of wild stories and individual claims--and a bunch of fuzzy and easily faked photographs--no one has ever been able to prove to my satisfaction that there are flying saucers zipping around in our skies...
...or that they are from space, from the hollow world at the center of the Earth, from Atlantis, time machines from our future, on and on, etc., etc.

What I do like about flying saucers is their place in our popular culture. I've spent years collecting things that relate to them, and I'll be showing them here over the next few days.

In the earliest days of flying saucer mania, the trick was to persuade people that the phenomenon was real. There were a lot of folks back then, as now, who found the whole thing hard to believe.

The first issue of Fate Magazine, in 1948, founded and edited by the aforementioned Ray Palmer, had a very fanciful cover illustration of the Arnold sighting. Other books, by authors like Major Donald E. Keyhoe, endlessly repeated stories of alleged flying saucer sightings. Authors like George Adamski had some sort of personal agenda, and perpetrated hoaxes of contact with aliens. It was up to the individual as to how to process this sort of "information."

Flying saucers quickly found their way into popular culture. Comics were very popular in the early days of the flap, so they capitalized on the visual images of flying saucers. One comic book, Weird Science-Fantasy, had the audacity to "challenge" the Air Force! Even in those days the government was seen as the enemy of knowledge, holding back information about the mysterious craft. I'm sure this comic book got a big laugh in the Pentagon.

More later!

Be A Nartist

I found this ad in a 1957 Mechanix Illustrated magazine. Those magazines were aimed at guys; guys who liked to do things, or at least read about doing them. Something you didn't often see in the pages of this type of journal was the softer stuff; how to be an artist was among the subjects you wouldn't find. It didn't stop the art school from advertising, though.

I noticed something over the years: When showing an artist, advertising invariably showed the artist drawing or painting a girl. Not just any girl, but a girl in a bathing suit. A pin-up girl, a sexy girl. This is as subtle as a brick upside the head: artists got to draw girls. Sometimes nude girls. That'd be enough to entice some guys to part with some money for the course.

When I went to art school I remember thinking that we'd be drawing from a live model, some cute chick, but the model they provided for us was a male dancer who was past his prime. He was quite wrinkled in the face, but his physique was still good for his age. I don't think they'd invite him to dance in the ballet again, though. Anyway, no nude girls for us. Just some tired-looking over-the-hill gay guy.

The Twentieth Century was the time of the artistic pin-up, from the Gibson Girl of the earliest years of the century to the calendar girls, drawn by commercial illustrators like Gil Elvgren or Peter Driben. Around the time this ad for the art school was published in Mechanix Illustrated the pin-up art was beginning to fade and wind down. The magazines were going like Playboy, with photo covers. Not like these really cute Driben covers from the late 1940s-early 1950s.

Click on pictures for full-size images.Paintings of girls in cheesecake poses acting coy and coquettish were replaced by photos of real-live girls. Or as real as an airbrush makeover by a photo retoucher could be. The painted pin-ups looked way more appealing to me. I knew they were idealized females; the Playboy models were idealized, also; their photos were doctored, but not so the readers would know. As far as the young men who read Playboy were concerned, women had no moles or warts, no scars or varicose veins. Not in those pictures, anyway.

An artist can put in or take out what he wants. The photographer works with what he has.

As far as being a commercial artist who gets to stand at an easel, posing pretty girls the way he wants them, that seems to be something from the past. He replaced his brushes with a camera, and his canvas for a computer monitor.

Ciao for now.

Dance Around The Coffee Pot

I guess I drink a lot of coffee. Is a pot a day a lot of coffee? Lord knows I've gotta have something that can keep me going, and sometimes a cup is enough and sometimes even a pot isn't. Yesterday was one of those days. I caught myself conking out at a stoplight, waking up in time for the light to turn green.

I drove to the nearest convenience store. That isn't far. Any good-sized city and you can find one on just about any corner. I found a Phillips 66 and headed right for the coffee pot. I noticed they have something they call Wake Up! Coffee with extra caffeine. OK, that's what I needed. I'm happy to report that I was wide awake after that, able to get through my afternoon without falling asleep at the wheel.

Even a coffeehead like me needs that extra jolt now and again.

********

"Dance Tonight" by Paul McCartney, his latest release, is what I'd call Lesser Paul, pop with a really great hook, but not enough of whatever it is that puts a song into the Greater Paul category. It's catchy enough, though, and anything its got going for it is made better by this video. I like the ghostly figures dancing around, I like the sound of the mandolin, and Paul's voice sounds…well, like Paul!

Paul is (now literally) the Grand Old Man. He's gone with YouTube as a vehicle, which is smart. Go where the customers are. This is the official video of "Dance Tonight" from his official production company.

Cup of tea? Or how about a cup of coffee?

Ciao for now.

Contort this!

These pictures would probably go under the heading of "Things You're Probably Not Likely To See Again," but then I noticed there are several websites devoted to contortionists. You might stumble on one of them, just as I did. God bless the InternetAfter looking at these pictures I need to take a Tylenol Arthritis Strength. My back hurts.


Ciao for now.

The Beard

Someone I've worked with for 30 years asked me when I grew my beard. They've never seen me without it. I grew it in October, 1973. A month before I grew it I was clean shaven, but I was a beard.

[Note: All of the names in this story are fictitious to spare the innocent and keep me out of trouble with the guilty.]

I was in San Francisco in September, 1973, visiting an old friend, Calvin. Cal was a hustler, a guy who knew a lot of the local artists I admired. It was the heyday of underground comix, the San Francisco posters were just starting to be seriously collected and Calvin was searching out artists and trading for their work. The reason I was in SF was because Cal and his wife Terri were divorcing, and the plan was for me to drive Terri and her kids back to Salt Lake in her car. For that reason I took a Greyhound bus to the Bay Area.

Al said to me, "Hey, it's Roger Crump's birthday. Would you like to go meet him?" Would I!

Roger Crump was and is one of the most famous of the underground comix artists who came out of San Francisco in the hippie era of the 1960s. I'd been familiar with his work before he was well known, through his appearances in Help! magazine, a satirical publication. I really loved his cartooning style. That day in September was Roger's 30th birthday.

We drove to his house on Brazil Street. Crump shared his pad with his friend Kerry and Roger's then-girlfriend, Katy. Cal introduced me to Roger. He also told Roger he was divorcing his wife and she'd be going with me to Salt Lake. Crump looked at me incredulously: "Your wife is going with him?" Cal corrected the assumption that I was running off with Terri. Crump thought Terri was very sexy. She had all of the features he drew into his cartoon women: tall, small busted, big firm butt, thick legs and ankles. I knew Cal to be a real hustler, and also knew he had pimped his wife to Roger to get some of Crump's original artwork. It worked, too. When Crump would go to Cal's house he'd have Terri wear tight hot pants (an old time version of short-shorts) and black knee-high spike-heeled boots. Crump was putty in the hands of such devious people.

Calvin began talking with Katy and told me, "Keep Roger busy!" then left the room with her. Say what? Keep him busy? Roger was completely ignoring me. I sat in an armchair petting Roger's cat, while Roger sat on the edge of a bed with his back to me, going through his collection of old 78 records. I enjoyed listening to the funky sounds. I still like Crump's choice of early Twentieth Century jazz, blues, hillbilly music. But keeping him busy I wasn't. Roger was busy picking out a tune on his banjo.

A little while later Cal and Katy reappeared. Crump asked us to drive him somewhere. He gave Cal and me each a copy of his latest comic book and off we went. I don't remember ever speaking with him, and he didn't give me any indication he wanted me to speak to him. We dropped him off and that was the last time I saw him in the flesh. Nowadays he's world famous, a hundred times more famous than he was then, but to me, even in his salad days, I felt in such total awe that I knew I was in way over my head. I knew he was shy, didn't like strangers, and I'm exactly the same way. I didn't want to impose myself on him.Later I found out a couple of things. One, Terri changed her mind. She still divorced Cal, but she decided to stay in California. So, no car trip. I took a bus back to Salt Lake. The second thing I found out was that Cal was having an affair with Roger's girlfriend. They had gone off for some illicit activity while we were there. I thought it was a big deal; that the disclosure of that affair would hurt Cal, hurt Katy. As it turned out, Crump got married, but not to Katy. He and his wife now live in France and came to the U.S. a few months ago to promote a book. They gave an interview where I found out that they have an open marriage. It's so open they announce it to the whole world. So there was probably no secret in Cal's affair with Katy, because Roger, according to his wife, has no jealousy in him whatsoever. Well.

Here's the interview from NPR about Mr. and Mrs. Crump's open marriage.

Oh yeah…I mentioned that I was a beard. Woody Allen used that term a few times in his movies. A beard is a stand-in. A beard is a guy who runs interference for someone engaged in an act he doesn't want identified with him. For many years I thought in this case I was a beard. I found out I was more of a goatee, or maybe just more of a goat.
Ciao for now.

Big, Bigger, Biggest Love

Big Love started its new season Monday on HBO. I'm happy to report that our favorite polygamists are still up to their necks in intrigue with the prophet of the polygamy cult (played so slimily by the great Harry Dean Stanton), and in trying to keep themselves from being exposed as polygamists.

This all sounds familiar because I'm living right in the middle of it. The series is set in Sandy, Utah,* which is where I live. When I moved into my house in 1975 there were three polygamous families within a stone's throw of my house. At least one of the families has moved away, and I haven't seen the others for a long time, so they might be gone, also.

In Big Love reference is made to a fictitious polygamist leader who is on the FBI's Most Wanted list. The fiction is based on Warren Jeffs, prophet of the FLDS (Fundamentalist Church Of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints). Jeffs was caught quite a while ago in Nevada. Here's what he looked like when he was captured. He wouldn't get the job playing himself in a movie. He looks too silly to play the part of a dangerous cult leader.I love the actors in Big Love, and despite the howls from my Mormon neighbors, the dialogue rings true. Mormons really do often reference their standard works in everyday conversation, really do discuss their religion on the job, and the mainstream church has a problem with being lumped in with polygamist sects.

None of the actors are from the culture I live amongst, but they have done a good job of sounding like they are.

Bill Paxton is great in his part as the family patriarch, and each of the actresses who play the wives are perfect in their parts. When they took beautiful women like Jeanne Tripplehorn and Chloe Sevigny and made them look like women I'd see in a Sandy, Utah grocery store, I was very impressed.





I've said this before. The only thing that doesn't ring true is the family being able to keep itself from being known as polygamists. A Utah native could look across the street and with a glance know it was polygamy.

*******

I've softened my objections to the final ending of The Sopranos. I've been reading all kinds of comments, and having thought about it for a few days I'm all right with it. I think it was one of the most suspenseful, well-edited three or four minutes ever. It made me anxious as to what would happen, and then after the buildup it went to black, unresolved! Like all of the other Sopranos fans I felt betrayed, but at least I can understand the thought processes behind such an ending.

Ciao for now.

*Set in Utah, but filmed in California. Seems funny; Touched By An Angel filmed in Salt Lake City for years and the city masqueraded as many other locales, but a show set in Utah is filmed somewhere else.

Sopranos, So What?

…so this is what those of us who have watched The Sopranos for eight years have to show for our time? An enigmatic ending so open to interpretation? So David Chase can't figure out how to end it so he just cuts it off and lets us figure it out?

As far as I'm concerned, HBO has trouble with finishing off series'. I hated the ending to Six Feet Under. At least we had some warning with that, because Nate's death was set up a couple of years before with the episodes about his brain condition. Where Six Feet Under failed was having that 15 minute "closer" with all of the tricky and self-indulgent deaths of the rest of the cast.

It's like David Chase looked at that and said, "I don't want that! I don't want to show all of the Sopranos knocked off in the last episode." So we got Bobby and Silvio in the penultimate episode, and then in the ultimate we're left with an ending that is set up well, at least. The family in a diner, camera showing different guys coming in the door, us thinking, "Is this the shooter?" and then having it cut off just as Steve Perry sings "Don't stop."

Well, we've put up with a lot of crap in The Sopranos hoping some of it would make sense later. The past few episodes, with the exception of Bobby's and Silvio's shootings, and the very satisfying shot of Phil Leotardo getting whacked and having his head run over (!!!) by an SUV, have been very boring. The second -to-last season, with Tony lying in the hospital after being shot by Junior, and the dreams of himself with an identity of someone named Kevin Finnerty, was not only boring, but pointless.

The stuff about A.J. has been excruciating. Very little Meadow, but a lot of my least favorite Soprano, A.J., sniveling, whining and kvetching. I wanted his head to be under the front wheel of the SUV.

C'mon…we as fans deserved better than this. I feel with HBO series that are such fan favorites that it's better to quit them about a year before they end. That way we'd have been some good memories of them.

Hey, HBO…hey, David Chase, how about this idea? You have an "epilogue season." You bring back the cast for six more episodes, only this time the season is about Tony fighting off racketeering and murder indictments. At the end he could walk, Teflon Don-style, or end up saying goodbye to his family from the slam.

Oh, yeah…almost forgot. It's the season premiere tonight of Big Love. I apparently haven't had enough punishment from HBO. So I'll be there.

Ciao for now.

"What'd you do yesterday?" "Nothin'."

If you've ever seen the movie, Office Space, you might remember the scenes where Peter is sleeping through Saturday while his boss leaves many phone messages asking him why he's not at work. A couple of days later his coworker asks him what he did that day and he says, "Nothing. And it was better than I thought it would be."

I saw that movie again Friday night, and decided it sounded like a good idea: a day to do nothing.

Well, no one can do nothing. I mean, you can't sleep all day because you'd have a backache. I would, anyway. Last time I slept all day was when I had a bad case of flu and sleeping seemed like a really good alternative to being awake and hangdog-sick. Even if you're staring at the wall you're doing something. So there really is no nothing, there's always something.

I went to the library and took back a book and a couple of DVD's I'd checked out the week before. When I got home I walked up the sidewalk and looked at the lawn. "Needs mowing," I said to no one.

Sally went with her lifelong friend, Kris, for a day of girl stuff. She left at 9:00 a.m. and I said, "I'll see you about 11:00 o'clock," but I didn't mean 11:00 a.m. Sally and Kris do this thing a couple of times a year and usually spend about 12 hours together, which is enough to keep them from seeing each other more than a couple of times a year.

I watched a DVD, Fiend Without A Face, a 1950s science fiction movie about invisible giant brains sucking the brains out of people.

I went into my computer room and wrote a blog. I wrote a couple of e-mails to friends. I looked up some information on Google.

I went back out in the living room and read a couple of issues of The New Yorker. Interesting articles in the May 28, 2007 issue. One is about the Belgian comic book character, Tintin, and his creator, Hergé; there's a report by author Paul Theroux on his visit to the country of Turkmenistan, whose leader is at least as cracked as Kim Il Jung of North Korea; then a story on the question of what were Secretary of War Edwin Stanton's real words when Lincoln died: "Now he belongs to the ages," or "Now he belongs to the angels"?

I never seem to have enough time to read. It's a luxury.

In the late afternoon it started to get hot in the house and my air conditioning came on. I don't remember much about the next few hours because while the a/c was on, my brain switched off. I know I watched a movie on HBO's On Demand but I can't tell you much about it. It involved shooting and a car chase.

I was in bed, reading a book, when Sally walked in the door at about 11:10 p.m. I wished her good night, turned out the light and then my own lights went out for the next eight hours.

It was a great day, my day of doing "nothing." I'm going to schedule another of those days sometime in the near future.

Ciao for now.

P.S. Sally showed me the dozens of digital photos she took yesterday while touring near Park City. Here are three of my favorites. Click on the pictures for full-size images.

Poppies

A house in Midway, Utah

The Provo River in a drought year.

Bush Is Ill, But Lincoln Is Still Dead

I saw the news story about the recently found Lincoln letter .

I wonder if anyone is checking on the authenticity of that letter? Mark Hofmann is a famous document forger who had world renown a couple of decades ago for his skill. No one would have found out about his documents had he not gotten caught after murdering a couple of people.

He mostly picked on the Mormon church, fooling many of their leaders, but also put out American history documents that have fooled experts. Among his "accomplishments" are documents with Lincoln's signature.

So, buyer beware…it's possible that Hofmann planted that document many years ago, like a time bomb waiting to go off. I would have been a little less skeptical had it not been reported that the recipient of the original letter telegraphed its contents, so while the original hadn't been seen since it was written, the text of the message has been long available.

Anything that shows up like this, any document, should be automatically checked for Hofmann's hand.

Right now he could be smirking and laughing from inside his Utah prison cell.

**********


It's been reported that Bush was sick with some stomach bug the last day of the G8 Conference.

Uh huh.

Then why is it that Nicolas Sarkozy, new president of France, is the one looking dyspeptic? Could it be because of who he's talking to?

Ciao for now.

D-Day Karma

It's the 63rd anniversary of D-Day.

With all of our WWII veterans dying off, it's more important than ever for us to remember the kinds of deeds they performed for us, in our names.

The Iraq War is immediate and on the news every night. It tends to put things like D-Day in better perspective because we're still sending soldiers into combat 63 years later. But, when you see people going about their daily lives, hardly mentioning it, I wonder how many people really care? If you asked some of the high school kids I see every day about D-Day they might conjure up Saving Private Ryan, but more than likely they'd give you a blank look. They look at World War II about the way I thought of the Civil War when I was in high school. It was a long ago event and nothing that happened then was important to me.

I thought that then, but now with age I see all of the wars which involve Americans as an ever-connecting link to the past. Lots of guys have died away from home in lonely, faraway places.

In 1970 a woman struck up a conversation with my friends and me about some things that now would be called New Age: mystical, hippie things that were common then, like astrology. At that time the Vietnam war looked like it would never end and we got onto that subject. I said I'd been lucky: at the height of the Vietnam war in 1967 I was sent to Germany to the peacetime Army. I wondered at my good fortune. She said, "Maybe it wasn't luck, maybe you are reincarnated from a soldier who died on a battlefield at one time, and your karma kept you away from this war."

It sounded funny at the time but it's interesting how what she said has stuck in my mind all these years. I'm not going to go all New Age on you and say I think it's true, but in it's way it made me think of the traditions of men marching off to war as has been done since the dawn of time, and since the founding of our country. It made me feel more connected to them, much more so than any lectures I got while in the Army about the history of wars we have fought.

Every so often that thought comes back to me. While watching Saving Private Ryan, still the best movie about war ever made, I thought, maybe I was one of those guys, coming off the landing craft, hitting the beach, getting the shit blown out of me by German artillery or machine guns. Then I had a mental note of whatever gods of karma there might be sitting around making notes on me in 1967, saying, "Hm. Postino has been drafted. He got killed last time around, so let's see he avoids it this time. Have the Army send him to Germany."

Hey, it could happen!

The cartoon above, from the book Up Front by Bill Mauldin, copyright 1945, is the image that future generations may always have of the Everyman American G.I.

With A Little Help From My Friends

Can it really have been 40 years since the original release of the Beatles' Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album? Memory plays tricks. Things that happened a couple of years ago seem far away and lost in time, but the Beatles are always fresh in my mind.

In 1967 I was in the U.S. Army, serving as a clerk in an artillery battery stationed just outside of Nuremberg, Germany. It was my first real time away from home, my first for-sure time outside of the country. My life was made just a little bit easier by some new friends I'd made, some white, some black. That didn't seem strange to me, even then, because I've never been a bigot, but then I came from a lily-white community where I didn't have an opportunity to be a bigot.

That year was a tough one in the United States (what we GI's called "The World"). There were race riots, and civil rights marches, and political and anti-war demonstrations. We were far away, but yet close enough by our ties as fellow Americans. Armed Forces Radio was heavily censored so we couldn't get much news from them. We could pick up the BBC, and we could hear the then-pirate radio station off the coast of England, Radio Caroline. That was where I first heard songs from Sgt Pepper.

I went to the post PX and picked up the British pressing of the album--I remember paying $2.50--and took it back to the barracks. I'd just bought a small Phillips portable record player which sounded awful, but it was the only thing I had to listen to records, so many of us in the barracks had them. At night you could hear all kinds of tinny-sounding music up and down the hallways of the barracks, soul, white pop, country and western. I didn't announce to anyone I had the album, just went back to the room in the barracks I shared with a couple of other guys, sat on my bunk and started playing the record. Within a short period of time there were several other men in the room, both white and black, listening to Sgt Pepper. None of us said anything, we just listened, right through to the sustained piano note in "A Day In The Life."

I wish I could say I was prescient and thought this was the absolute best thing I'd ever heard, or that I felt transcended in some way, but actually there were cuts that disappointed me. I thought George's "Within You Without You" with its prominent sitar was a waste of vinyl, and didn't care much for Paul's "She's Leaving Home," which I thought at the time was sappy. It took a few more listens before I got into the total groove of the album, but it happened. After that first hearing, when the record was over the other guys left the room. One guy stayed behind to talk about it. My black friends had listened in silence as we all had, but nowadays I wonder if it was a racial thing: that they were listening in on what white boys liked so they'd know what cultural forces were at work in the white community. As an African-American friend once explained to me, "Black people know more about white people than you know about blacks, because we are always paying attention." Or maybe they liked the Beatles, too. They never said.

That was 40 years ago. A whole lifetime. Later there were the albums The Beatles, commonly called The White Album, from which Charlie Manson heard things none of the rest of us did, and has some of the Beatles' finest songs. Then what I considered the Beatles greatest album ever, Abbey Road. I believe both of those albums owed their greatness to the groundwork laid by Sgt Pepper. But they came later, when my Army stint was over. What I most remember about hearing Sgt Pepper for the first time that June of 1967 was that in my barracks room there were 12 ears listening silently and intently to every word and every note that came out of that cheap Phillips record player.

Ciao for now.

A Man Is Obliged To Look

Last week while grocery shopping with Sally I walked by a chesty young woman showing about 6" of cleavage. As is my wont in these cases, after having perfected over five decades the art of looking at boobs without being seen, I took a mental snapshot. I turned away before she could catch me looking. Not quick enough for an elderly woman standing by the dairy case, who saw me looking and who shot me a dirty look of her own. If her eyes had been tasers I'd have been writhing on the floor.

I thought, who the hell are you, lady? Sure I looked; I'm a man. A man must look. After all, the young woman carefully chose her clothing that morning, going out for maximum effect. She must've wanted someone to look. I don't think Sally even saw her, but I did, as did the prudish old lady who saw me take my mental photo.

I'm not even that surprised by what females find appropriate to wear outside their homes anymore. I've been working in and around high schools now for years. Over time I've seen the clothing drop away from the girls. I read in the newspaper this morning about more and more young women finding amateur pornography and exhibitionism appealing. Who knew? Why wasn't this happening when I was young enough to do something about it?

Some girls of my generation. Click on pictures for full-size images.
Today we were at the same store and while walking through I spotted a young Latina with a very low cut top. Across the tops of her breasts she had a word tattooed in script that I think was Juggaletto. I don't know what a word like that would mean in Spanish, or whether it's a nickname. It seemed appropriate, considering her bodacious baba-looeys.

Some girls of today's generation.
Ciao for now.

New American

Here's our new American, my daughter-in-law. Along with 195 other immigrants she got her certificate yesterday in a ceremony in Salt Lake City, Utah.

She was born near Saigon, now Ho Chi Minh City. She is the oldest of 10 children. All of her siblings, and her parents, are still living in Vietnam.

With her new citizenship she has taken a new American name, Julia.

I feel very proud of her and for her. In many ways, and considering the way most Americans take their citizenship for granted--even abuse it--I think she deserves it more than some who have it by birthright. She is a hardworking person who has contributed much to society since she's lived in our country.

Besides, she and my son have made a couple of really great children!
Congratulations to Julia and all of the other 195 people who attained their citizenship yesterday, our new fellow Americans.

Ciao for now.

Memorial Day 2007

To all of the brave men and women, then and now, who gave their all.

We remember you.

Now, Junior, Behave Yourself

A bad little kid moved into my neighborhood
He won't do nothing right just sitting down and looks so good
He don't want to go to school and learn to read and write
Just sits around the house and plays the rock and roll music all night
Well, he put some tacks on teachers chair
Puts some gum in little girl's hair
Now, junior, behave yourself

The other day I walked into an elementary school during an assembly for parents. In the office the principal was pushing a young guy, maybe a 5th or 6th grader, onto a chair. She told the secretary, "He's not going to ruin this for everyone else." I assume she meant he had been acting up in the assembly.

I've seen this kid in the office of that school before. I've seen his mom and dad in the office with the principal. Apparently this kid is the school hell-raiser. The office staff just shake their heads, but the custodian told me once he had taken a dump on the boy's room floor. Sounds like a kid who has some problems.

As I was leaving I noticed he was sitting with his arms folded in front of him, his lips set into a thin line, and his eyes were straight ahead, not on anything in particular. I don't know what a child psychologist would call this body language, but to me it says defiance.

Going tell your mama you better do what she said
Get to the barber shop and get that hair cut off your head
Threw the canary and you fed it to the neighbors cat
You gave the cocker spaniel a bath in mother's Laundromat
Well, mama's head has got to stop
Junior's head is hard as rock
Now, junior, behave yourself

I don't speak to students. It's a policy I've had for 30 years, and unless I'm asked a direct question or am spoken to directly I just keep my mouth shut. This kid, though, I wanted to tell him in as direct a manner as possible: "You can't win."

The deck is stacked against rebellion, defiance of authority, in the school system, in society in general. Some inner programming in some kids makes them kick against the pricks, though. I could tell the kid that, but it wouldn't work. It never does. You've just got to hope they get smart early enough, so that everyone won't give up on them, because that's what happens. Then the real trouble begins.

Bad boys, bad boys
Whatcha gonna do, whatcha gonna do
When they come for you

When you were eight
And you had bad traits
You go to school
And learn the golden rule
So why are you
Acting like a bloody fool
If you get hot
You must get cool

For several years part of my route included one of the kid jails in our county. I call them kid jails but they're official "detention centers" or some other euphemism. But really they're jails for youthful offenders. The worst was a secure, lockdown facility out in the middle of a field, fed into by a single road. If a kid were to go over the wall from that facility he'd be easily picked up because of the distance he would have to travel to get anywhere. Using my own euphemism, I called that one the Young Murderers Program.

Years ago they were holding a 16-year-old who had invaded the home of a 40-year-old woman, beat her, raped her, kidnapped her in her own car, taken her to the shore of the Great Salt Lake, stripped her nude and left her. This was in the middle of December, too. You can't throw a kid that age into prison, but what he did was so bad he belonged there. So they put him in the youth offender program until he was old enough to go to prison.

I was talking about him with a school custodian who told me he'd known the kid when he was five-years-old. The custodian said, "If I was ever to pick a kid who would end up in prison, it'd be that kid." You've got to feel sorry for the teachers and counselors who tried and failed to reach that boy during his growing up years. You also wonder if there came a point where they all looked at him and said, "We've done all that we could, now just go on out and do your thing and we'll see you when they stick the needle in your arm on your execution day."

Well, I'm exaggerating, because in our society people are given chance after chance, and if they're smart they'll take the chance. If not, they'll end up where the rapist-kidnapper ended up.

I looked at the defiant kid in the chair in that elementary school and wanted so bad to tell him what I had to say: "You just can't win. No matter how many times you show hostility to authority or act out against your family or society you just can't win. It's not the way our system works. Wise up now, kid. Pay attention."But what I did was what I always do in that situation: Walk out without saying anything, let the professionals handle him.

Why did you have to act so mean
Don't you know you're human being
Born of a mother with the love of a father
Reflections come and reflections go
I know sometimes you want to let go
Hehehe
I know sometimes you want to let go

Lyrics are from "Bad Boy" by the Beatles and the theme from Cops, "Bad Boys" by Inner Circle. Cartoons are cover illustrations from Panic, issues one and two, from 1954.

50% Honest

Today I lost my cell phone. I got to a school on my route and realized I didn't have it. I retraced my steps and drove to a school where I thought I'd lost it. I asked the secretary if someone had turned in a cell phone and she held it up. "A lady just brought it in," she said.

"Great," I said. "Where's the case?" I have a nice leather cover with a magnetic flap, so the phone can't fall out.

"There wasn't a case," she replied.

So I got my phone back, which was important, but no case. Hmmm. Now where did it go? If the whole thing fell out of my truck onto the ground, then the phone wouldn't just fall out of the case because of the magnetic flap. What I had to conclude was the lady who found the phone took the phone out of the case, kept that, then turned in the phone.

Click on pictures for full-size images.I should consider myself lucky that I got the phone back, and that she hadn't kept both, or even just turned in the case. But it's still just 50% of what I lost. So is she 50% honest?

Do you get into heaven if you do right 50% of the time? Like you only shoplift every other time you go to Macy's, or you only deliberately break the speed limit half the time? Or you give back what you found after taking half of it?I don't understand the morality of that, but I'm still glad to get my phone back. She could have made a bunch of calls before I cancelled the service and left me holding the bill, but she didn't.But I'm only 50% grateful to her.

Ciao for now.

Heave-ho

I walked into the office of a junior high on my school route yesterday. One of the secretaries told me, "Don't look over at Debbie's desk. There's a kid being sick." Of course I looked at Debbie's desk. Debbie was typing, which is what I usually see her doing. There was a boy on his knees leaning over her trash can, heaving. My first thought was, "I'm glad they put liners in those cans."

The girl who told me not to look was grimacing, as was the other girl across from her. They are both young women who don't have children. Debbie, on the other hand, is a mom, so a kid barfing is nothing new to her. Nor should it be in any school. You've got to expect things like that in schools.

Once I talked to a secretary who couldn't stand the sight of blood. I said, "How can you be a school secretary when kids are coming up to you all the time with cut fingers or waving a bloody stump of an arm?" She said, "I ask someone else to put on a Band-Aid." She told me she had five children, so I asked how she survived their upbringing. She said, "I'd call the neighbor to come over and dress their wounds."
I wonder how I'd do in this particular situation? Years ago a coworker, Dick, drove into a schoolyard to see a commotion on the playground. A big kid had somehow gotten a rope knotted around his neck and was hanging from the overhead ladder, strangling. A teacher was trying to untie the knot while the kid was grabbing at it. Both were in a panic. Dick ran over, took his pocketknife and cut the kid down, then carried him into the school where the knot was untied. By this time the kid was purple. The principal called paramedics, then called the parents, who said, "Oh, no need to take Johnny to the hospital. We're sure he's fine." In other words, Mom and Dad had no medical insurance. The principal was wise to send the kid to the hospital, anyway, despite dire threats of lawsuits from the parents. A lot of people don't realize that when a kid is in school the principal has parental rights in such cases.

The kid recovered, but not so Dick, who was never the same. Dick was a short man, about 5'2" tall, with an enormous paunch that practically touched the ground when he walked. Running with the large boy in his arms put his back into spasms, and he had some other damage, too. Eventually, after two or three years, a couple of surgeries and lots and lots of sick leave, Dick retired. I'm sure the kid has grown up by now and that incident is just a distant memory, but Dick is probably still paying for it.

So entering a school you never know what you'll see. Custodians tell me kids sometimes shit in a corner, and vomiting is common. What the hell are these kids eating that makes them little puking machines? I haven't thrown up twice in the past 20 years, much less twice a week like some of these kids. Or could it be…stress? For some kids just the thought of school, or taking a test, or being late with an assignment, is enough to cause last night's dinner and this morning's Cheerios to make a quick trip backwards through the esophagus.
Ciao for now.

Don't Be A Fred, It's Only Me...

Do you know me? Do you think you know me? Some people do.

Saturday morning I had my car in to get it serviced. I was talking with the service manager when a man with a Spanish accent walked up to me and said, "Hey, Fred, what you doin' out here--?" then he looked at me and said, "You're not Fred! You look just like Fred!" The service manager said, "Yep, you look just like Fred, all right."

Poor Fred. He might be the person people are spotting and walking up to, thinking he's me. It happened a couple of months ago to one of my female coworkers who said, "I saw you at the burger joint yesterday afternoon." I said I wasn't at any burger joint. "Oh, really? You're kidding, right? I mean, it was you."

Well, no, it wasn't me. I told the story to another female coworker who told me that a few months prior she'd seen a man she was sure was me at a restaurant. She was so sure she went up to "me," who was really some puzzled guy, and started talking to him. It was only then she realized it wasn't me. She asked him if maybe he was my brother. He said no. I told her, luckily for my brother, he looks nothing like me. The Monday after that yet another female coworker approached me, asking me if I'd been in a local sporting goods store the previous Saturday. No, I hadn't.

Somewhere out there I have a doppleganger, a double. It may or may not be Fred. It may be several people. It may be that middle-aged white men with white beards are a distinct species, and we all look alike.

I have noticed over the years that lots of people I don't know walk by me, smile with a look of recognition and say hello. They may "know" me, or think they do. It's all kind of creepy, really. I just hope my double isn't a bank robber or liable to get me in trouble. (Paranoia.) And perhaps my double realizes he has a double out there, and is worrying the same thing. Then that double has a double, who has a double…and on and on. Maybe someday we'll all run into each other at a burger joint, restaurant or sporting goods store, and we can all have a good laugh.

Ciao for now.