Good Vibrations!

©2006 The Pyramid Collection
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I was thumbing through a catalogue my wife got on Saturday. It's from The Pyramid Collection, subtitled "A Catalog Of Personal Growth & Exploration."

Hey, explore this! A nifty little set of battery-operated fingertip vibrators for only $19.95. Could the person who translated the name of this item from the original Japanese (if it was translated) been amused or aware of how the name Fukuoku looks to American eyes? It's a perfect name for what it is.

Personally, I'd also like to explore the spider web dress and thigh-highs on just the right black widow.

They've even got a video of nude aerobics from the pornmeister, Ron Harris. I'm sure that'll be a big seller from those interested in self-exploration.

Considering the innocuous cover of this catalogue, there are quite a few little surprises inside.

Ciao for now, El Postino

Ring, Ring Goes The Bell...

School starts on Monday. Even without a calendar I'd always be able to tell when school is starting because the kids start hanging around the school and playground. They ride their bikes in the parking lots, kind of circling around, like they're reacquainting or re-acclimating themselves. Maybe they're telling themselves what I told myself many, many years ago: this year I'll do better. This year I'll do my assignments the night they're assigned and not the morning they are due. This year I'll be quieter in class, less of a class clown (maybe most kids don't need to remind themselves of that, since there is usually only one class clown per classroom). This year I'll be popular, this year I'll get a girlfriend, this year I'll write a book, this year I'll fly into outer space, this year I'll become a secret agent, a popular cartoonist, a star of my own TV sitcom, a superhero like Batman, or a rich person like Uncle Scrooge with a money bin full of ca$h.

Or not.

I'll be anything this school year but I won't plan for what I'll end up being, a guy who drives a truck for the school district and is reminded constantly that lives often don't go as we wish them to go.

*******

I checked in with another blog I read occasionally, Bored Housewife. Lisa is a young woman with a successful husband and twin boys. She is a vivid writer, but sometimes her blogs can get more stream-of-consciousness than I like. Still, I enjoy most of her jottings and skip past the prattling to get to the sexy parts. Lisa's blog led me to a blog I also enjoy, Rachel Stephens Photography. Rachel takes pictures of women in all of their sumptuous and gorgeous glory. I think women take better pictures of women than men do. Women know the inner woman, the real sensuous being inside a woman better than men do. Men project their fantasies to the outside of a woman, women project from the inside. Something like that, anyway. Check out this blog, because Rachel takes some really nice pictures.

*******

In my secret identity as an eBay seller I occasionally get a nice letter from a satisfied customer. Last week I got a note from a former Playboy Bunny thanking me for selling her a couple of 1979 issues of Playboy, because a friend of hers, now deceased, was in one of the issues. So now I can say, I satisfied a Playboy Bunny!

Ciao for now, El Postino

Prison Break Is Broken

"Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me."

I gave the Fox show Prison Break one more chance, watching the second season opener tonight. My AD/HD was really apparent during the show. I couldn't sit still, jumping up several times to go check my e-mail, downstairs to throw a load of wash into the dryer, into the bathroom to count my gray hairs.

My wife noticed, "You can't sit still during the show, but you're watching the commercials. Isn't that the opposite of what everyone else does?"

I answered, "At least the commercials make sense."

I'd been hoping that Prison Break would start making sense to me, or that I could start to care about the characters. I watched five or six episodes of the show last season and gave up. There wasn't much about it that I thought was good. The premise is completely silly, the acting is wooden, the characters aren't interesting or likable. Are you getting the drift of where I'm going with this?

I thought maybe once they actually made the break of the title that maybe the lead guy, Michael, played by Wentworth Miller, might smile. But no. I've seen more expressions on cigar store Indians. That guy has what you call chiseled features…chiseled into one look which covers everything: anger, joy, love…

But the one thing that absolutely sank the show for me, the reason I'll never watch it again is, they killed off the character played by Robin Tunney. Guys, in Robin you had a beautiful woman who can act, even though it's apparently not necessary to act to be in a Fox Network program. So, bah, I hope you all go back to prison. Can't be soon enough for me.

Oh yeah, I heard some lines somewhere in the story about them heading for the "desert of Utah" to look for something. Ha-ha. Utah has a lot of desert. I mean, a lot. Where would you like to start?

*******

Here's a picture of my granddaughter, Gabby, with the popular Vietnamese singer, Bao Han, who appeared at the Vietnamese Fair here on Sunday. Bao is one beautiful woman, and she sings pretty good, too. You can check out this video with another popular singer, Loan Chau. It's very traditional in style, very beautiful and elegant.

Ciao for now, El Postino

A.D.D.ing It Up...

I was talking with a Special Ed teacher I've known for many years, explaining to her about my coworker, who I'm sure has Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder. I talked to him about it two years ago and said he'd probably be in less trouble with our boss if he did something about it. He never has and he's still in constant trouble.

The teacher friend looked at me and said, "Have you considered that you might also have AD/HD?" She said it in her own gentle way, but she could have sucker-punched my kidney and it would have been less of a blow.

I again looked up AD/HD online and read about it. Two years ago I saw my coworker as the person with the disorder, now I see myself. Sometimes it takes a third party to make you see yourself as you really are. My symptoms are not as bad as my coworker's, so it hasn't taken over my life, but I see that I have definitely had Attention Deficit Disorder during the course of my life. It made a lot of things about me click into place and suddenly make sense.

Will I do anything about it? I'll talk to my doc about it when I see her for my yearly this fall and see what she says.

*******

In my last blog I showed an ad for a photography studio that poses your kids with Jesus. I found some other things online, all of them that a devoutly religious Christian would find upsetting at Archie McPhee. A Jesus nodder? The only thing missing from the bunch are Jesus and Mary salt-and-pepper shakers.

People in the Muslim world rioted over cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed, but while some Christian religious people would find these Jesus caricatures offensive, this is still America where we're all allowed to be offensive.

*******

I went to a family reunion for my wife's family yesterday. It was a luau, pool party, lots of food, talking to people I only see at functions like this--or at funerals. Three of my wife's cousins and I were standing poolside chatting when my wife's cousin, Cindy, came over to us, looked at four middle-aged guys with white beards and Hawaiian shirts and said, "You guys look like the Beach Boys."

It was a lot different when we met 40 years ago in high school, when we were all trying to look like The Beatles.

*******

Finally, I'm not listening to The Beatles or Beach Boys this week, but to another old-timer, John Fogerty. After decades of lawsuits and countersuits over the rights to his songs, he has resolved that and is back with Fantasy Records. This record is a compilation of hits by Creedence Clearwater Revival and some of John's more recent work, mixing in live and classic tracks. It's wonderful to hear Fogerty in such strong voice, still rockin' out at age 61.

It's also interesting to hear great songs like "Who'll Stop The Rain?" and "Fortunate Son," both antiwar songs of their day, become relevant again, 35 years on. Timeless stuff like this will always be relevant.

For all that, the song on the album I find most affecting is "Centerfield." That song is poignant to me and it makes me smile; it is a very optimistic song, using baseball and a guy who is "ready to play, today," as a metaphor for starting over. Fogerty wrote it years ago, but I hope it means something different to him now.

Have Your Picture Taken With Jesus

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I'm not religious, but I find this ad from a local ad flyer over the top, even for an area mostly populated by Mormons. Have your kids' picture taken with Jesus? I thought the department store Santa Claus at Christmas was going too far--promoting the idea that there is a man somewhere wanting to know what you want, and willing to give it to you--and now we have pictures of your children with "the Savior."

Lord save us all.

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I haven't written in a few days. It's because of the dog days of summer. I ain't just a'woofin', but I feel the heat and all I want to do is lie down in the shade and pant.

The days start out hot, then in the afternoon clouds boil up from the south. We get some lightning, some thunder, occasionally some rain or hail, but mostly it just makes the hot air muggy. In the desert where we live people like to say, "But at least it's a dry heat." Ah, so what. Hot's hot.

*******

Along the lines of the Jesus ad above, here's a picture of Homeland Security Director, Michael Chertoff, from Saturday, August 12. "St. Michael, deliver us from the terrorists that come from the sky." A very apt picture, don't you think?

Ciao for now, El Postino

Funny Dick

Click on picture for full-size image.

See funny Dick.

Dick is a joker. See Dick at work.

See him put Vaseline on doorknobs. See him put salt in the sugar bowl on the lunchroom table.

Funny, funny Dick!

Dick bought a fake hand grenade. He got it from an ad.

See Dick do what the ad says. He threw it when his coworkers were standing around having break.

See Dick now standing around in the unemployment line.

Funny, funny, jobless Dick!

See Dick at the airport.

Dick tried to sneak the hand grenade on a plane as a joke.

Naughty, naughty Dick! See Homeland Security see Dick!

See Dick in Guantanamo.

Sad, sad, funny Dick.

Busted!

Oops. Been caught, huh?

What I want to know is, if there was all this publicity about Lance Armstrong being accused of doping before his first win at Tour de France, if there is common knowledge that testing is done after the race, after the win, then why the hell would a guy risk it? Is the win worth the public humiliation afterwards?

Some folks apparently don't know shit from this stuff.
Ciao for now, El Postino

Cool Cash

You couldn't grow up in America in the past 45 years without hearing Johnny Cash on radio or TV. He had a persona that transcended his early rockabilly or country image. However, I never paid a lot of attention to Cash because he was just there, just like Ray Charles was just there, or the Kinks or The Who were "just there."

It wasn't until I read some reviews of Cash's album American Music IV: The Man Comes Around that I started to pay attention. When I listened to it for the first time I was deeply moved by both the choice of material and by Cash's sense of his own mortality.

So I was pleasantly surprised this summer by the release of American Music V: A Hundred Highways. I didn't know there was more material that Cash had recorded before his death. I understand there's even enough for a sixth CD next year.

That's good news for both of us: those of you who have been lifelong Johnny Cash fans, and those of us, like me, slow to appreciate him.

Cash's voice varies in quality from track to track on American Music V (as was the case with IV), and the best songs are those where he is in a voice closer to the one familiar to all of us from the songs "I Walk The Line" or "Folsom Prison Blues." Producer Rick Rubin should take a lot of credit, because the arrangements and interpretations of each song spotlights Cash's strong points, even when his voice isn't at full strength.

I bought American Music V a few weeks ago and it's been in more or less permanent rotation in my car CD player ever since. My favorite songs are his own song, "Like The 309," and Don Gibson's "A Legend In My Time." I don't dislike any of the songs on the CD, and coming up a close second as favorites are "Love's Been Good To Me," which I was shocked to see was written by the old schmaltzmeister Rod McKuen. "Four Strong Winds" by Ian Tyson (was the original by Ian and Sylvia? I've forgotten) is also a great cover.

Sometimes I've heard a song hundreds of times and I've stopped listening, if you know what I mean. That would describe "If You Could Read My Mind," Cash's cover of the old Gordon Lightfoot song. I liked it by Lightfoot, but Cash's version, quavering voice and all, has made me really hear it for the first time in years. That's the beauty of a great cover version. You have something very familiar reinterpreted, and made new.

In my local newspaper, The Salt Lake Tribune, music critic Dan Nailen, who also reviews punk rock, rap, hard rock and music I don't even try to describe, gave this CD an outstanding review. Paraphrasing him, he mentioned that there would be another CD next year and said if the material was as strong as this CD then Johnny Cash went out pretty close to the top of his game. Because of his background in rock the reviewer reminded me that there are really no genres for an artist like Johnny Cash; it's just American music.

What it's done for me is make me appreciate and listen to a very important artist, but one I'd been mostly ignoring for decades. My loss, but I'm trying to catch up!

Ciao for now, El Postino

Cool Will Rule

The heat wave that has been hanging around the Western U.S. for a couple of weeks has moved East. Sorry, Midwesterners and Easterners and Southerners, Mr and Mrs North and South America and all the ships at sea…now you'll see what we've been going through for most of July. It's been 100º or better for quite a while, a couple of days hitting around the 105º or 107º range. I know that doesn't seem like much to you folks in Tucson or Phoenix, Arizona, where you put on your winter coats if it gets under 95º, but to me, descendent of Northern Europeans who spent thousands of years in their frigid climes freezing their asses, 100º is just too damn hot.

*******

Monday was my mom's 85th birthday. She's in an Alzheimer's care center, where she's lived the past two years. Despite the fact that Mom sometimes knows us and sometimes doesn't, despite her not being able to walk since breaking her hip in April, 2004, despite the fact she mistakes me for my dad with whom she had major issues, she seems to be doing very well.

She's well medicated. She's on an anti-psychotic for her paranoid delusions, she's on the antidepressant, Zoloft, she's on Ambien so she can sleep at night (insomnia has always plagued Mom, and unfortunately, I inherited that tendency), she's on three Lortabs a day to manage her pain, and Aricept to slow down the process of her disease. Mom likes to sit in the hallway and watch the world go by. She has the proverbial three hots and a cot, like we used to say in the army. She has no responsibilities, she can participate in activities or not, she has my brother visiting her every day. Her daily life is not empty, as we tend to think life in a nursing home would be.

We visited her on Sunday, taking our 19-month-old granddaughter, Bella. Bella is a big hit in the nursing home, but all of the people making over her scare her. She's a good sport to put up with it for a while, but after that she wants to get out of there.

Today one of the secretaries I work with told me her husband has been diagnosed with Alzheimer's. I feel very sorry for her; it's a long road to travel, and always comes out a dead end.

Despite all of that, Happy Birthday, Mom! I know you won't be reading this, and even if someone reads it to you it won't mean anything, but I hope you had a happy day.

*******

I found this VIP cartoon which with a few pen lines and pithy one-line caption perfectly captures my paranoid boss.

Ciao for now, El Postino

Five Degrees Of Separation

Yesterday was a day full of connections, reminding me of the old saying that there are only six degrees of separation between any of us. Reading my newspaper in the morning I saw an obituary for Denny M., who was a high school classmate of mine from the class of '65. I didn't hang with Denny; he was buddies with a crowd of rowdies including my wife's cousin, Steve. I haven't seen Denny for over 40 years, but Steve has talked occasionally of Denny's stint in the Marine Corps during the Vietnam conflict. Denny's obit mentions that he earned the Bronze Star in Vietnam for "exhibiting uncommon courage and fierce determination." Yep, that was Denny, all right. When we were in high school together he used a lot of that fierce determination to get himself into trouble.

Later in the morning I was at the Post Office, going back to my car when I saw a pretty woman power-walking up the sidewalk. When she got closer she waved at me. It was my sister-in-law, Nancy.

After Nancy breezed on by--she didn't stop; exercise walking, y'know--I visited a local thrift store looking for books. I found a couple of good ones, but on my way to the checkstand caught a glimpse of a magazine I've looked for for several years: Salt Lake Magazine from March-April, 1999 with cover model Brittney Lewis, who has been seen around here in print ads and television commercials since she was just a tot. Besides being a beauty, Brittney is a shirttail relative.

How is someone a shirttail relative? Well, I've prepared a chart:

1. Sally is married to El Postino.

2. Randy is brother of Sally, married to El Postino.

3. Cyndy is married to Randy, brother of Sally, married to El Postino.

4. Nancy is sister of Cyndy, married to Randy, brother of Sally, married to El Postino.

5. Brittney is daughter of Nancy, sister of Cyndy, married to Randy, brother of Sally, married to El Postino.

See? That's only five degrees of separation, and that's how you make a shirttail relative.

Adding to all of this connectedness is my brother-in-law, Dave, who is married to Nancy, making him Brittney's stepdad. My connection is Dave is married to Nancy, sister of Cyndy, married to Randy, brother of Sally, married to El Postino.

Dave and Randy are brothers. Nancy and Cyndy are sisters. Two brothers, two sisters, which makes them their own brothers and sisters-in-law.

And what does it make me? Well, somehow connected.

I had a hard time getting a decent picture of Brittney's cover of Salt Lake Magazine, but here's the best of several digital photos I took. From the cover you can see why Brittney gets noticed when she is in the room.

Ciao for now, El Postino

How I Went Mad In The 1950s

As a kid I never kicked and fussed when Mom took me to the grocery store, because it gave me a chance to stand near the magazine rack and paperback book spinner, ogling the sexy covers.

On one occasion in 1955 or thereabouts I spotted a book I'd never seen before. It was The Mad Reader. I opened it up to the first panel of Wally Wood's "Superduperman" story, and the rest, as they say, is history.

The problem is, as much as I wanted this book, and I wanted it really, really bad, Mom wouldn't buy it for me. Mom was aware of stories in the press about evil comic books turning children into juvenile delinquents, and while she let me read comic books she approved of (Uncle Scrooge, Little Lulu, etc.), she wasn't about to go over the line to something like Mad.

I went home disappointed, but then my obsessive-compulsive disorder kicked in. When I wanted something as bad as I wanted this book I usually kept up a whining, obnoxious pleading until my parents caved in. Since Mom had said no, I went to my dad. Dad was usually more easygoing when it came to things like this. Of course, listening to me bellow, snivel and whine for about an hour was all it took. He got into his 1955 Ford company car and went to the store to find the book for me.

It's said that Mad, in its original comic book incarnation was a flop saleswise until issue #4, which had the aforementioned "Superduperman" story. From that time on Mad became a cult favorite. Even my future brother-in-law, who was in in high school in the early '50s, bought Mad, as did his buddies. I didn't know any of that, though. I just knew that I recognized who Superman was, I knew who the Lone Ranger was, I knew the comic book character, Archie, and I was absolutely fascinated by the grotesque and funny artwork of Wally Wood, Bill Elder and Jack Davis, which took all of those characters and turned them inside out and upside down. It turned them into jokes! All of it was new to me at the time, though. From that book I went on to seek out other Mad paperbacks, like Mad Strikes Back, Inside Mad, and Utterly Mad. From the time I first held these books in my trembling junior-size paws I was totally hooked, a junkie to the drug of Mad-ness.

Mom's problem with Mad was the effect the drawings had on her, which was the exact opposite of the effect they had on me. She claimed they "made her head spin." They did that to me, too, but in a good way.

Take Bill Elder's version of Archie, called "Starchie." The art is very close to the original. The people who produce the Archie comic books like to tout their comics as being "wholesome," but there was no doubt that the whole subtext of their comic books was some sort of triangular sexual thing going on between Archie, Betty and Veronica. The author and editor of Mad, Harvey Kurtzman, always went for the most obvious satirical elements of what it was he was lampooning, and that is the crux of this story, behind its more obvious elements of Starchie and gang being juvenile delinquents.
The Lone Ranger was a guy who traveled around with a Native American companion and wore a mask. As in this Mad version called "The Lone Stranger," he steered clear of womenfolk. One might ask why…? And did he and Tonto share body heat around the campfire? Anyway, when I saw this Jack Davis panel of the Lone Stranger being chased by the ugly "girl," I laughed my guts out. Yes, the lady chasing the Lone Stranger is actually a man in drag. Hmmm. I was a big fan of Mad in the 1950s, but the two entities, the Mad paperback books and the regular Mad Magazines being published every couple of months were entirely different things. I wondered why, but didn't know what made them different until a few years later when I found out about the stories of the two editors, first Kurtzman, then Al Feldstein, about the Comics Code, about the color comic book after 23 issues becoming a 25¢ black and white periodical. Much to my mom's chagrin, and despite a lot of yelling, public burnings of my magazine collections, and even outright theft of mail-ordered copies of early Mad comic books, I didn't give up on Mad until I was ready to, which was sometime in the early '60s.

Whatever happened with The Mad Reader, though, I'm sure happened with a lot of people in my generation, aspiring cartoonists, comedians, actors, whomever. It was an epiphany for me to know that such brilliance could exist in parody and satire and looking back on that book today I still see the sort of genius I saw many years ago the first time I pulled it off the paperback rack.

Ciao for now, El Postino

*The copy of Mad Reader at the header of this article is not my original Mad Reader, which was destroyed at some point by my mother in the mid-to-late 1950s. This is a copy of a first printing I picked up in California 20 years ago.

World Of The Wars

Tonight Sally and I watched Spielberg's version of War Of The Worlds. I saw it last year during its theatrical release and was impressed enough to watch it again because I like the storytelling in this film. At the root of any good story you've got to have characters the audience cares about and identifies with. I'm also glad that the special effects, as impressive as they are, weren't allowed to completely take over the movie.

In that sense Spielberg is lightyears ahead of filmmakers who make dopey films like Van Helsing and The Brothers Grimm, both of which I suffered through on On Demand recently. Why is it, when a filmmaker has millions of dollars with which to make a movie, he often forgets the most simple thing of all, that there has to be a story? I don't want the kitchen sink thrown at me with every special effect the computer boys can muster onto the screen. All the special effects in the world can't save a bad story, but a good story will save a movie with no special effects.

War of the Worlds has been one of my favorite H. G. Wells stories since I was a kid. Sometime about 1955 or '56 I was in a drugstore and saw the Classics Illustrated version on a shelf. A young teenage girl, at least a half head taller than me and twice as wide, had just put it back and turned to talk to her friend. I snatched it away just as it came to rest on the shelf. "Hey!" she said. "I was looking at that!"

"Tuff titty!" said I, mustering up a rusty-sounding squeak from my 9-year-old throat, knowing the girl could have punched my lights out. She looked that big to me. Luckily she just shrugged and walked away.

Anyway, the picture you see of the cover of that Classics Illustrated is the very copy I snatched away from that teenager in 1956. I still have it, and still look at it and re-read it every decade or so. I have also re-read the original Wells novel a couple of times since the 1950s.

One thing has always bothered me about the story, though, and seemed more obvious in this latest movie version. If the Martians (unidentified as to origin in Spielberg movie) were brought down by common bacteria, why not send home to the Martian Pharmacy for some antibiotics, or just wear spacesuits next time they plan an attack? Hey, they figured out how to get to earth, and they're obviously pretty clever with their weaponry. I'm sure it'd only be temporary before they could solve the problem of earth bacteria. So watch the skies…they might just be back.

*******

I wonder…is the movie War Of The Worlds in any way a reverse reflection of our invasion of Iraq? Naw, couldn't be, could it? I mean, we all know that an enemy invasion of someone else's country often doesn't work because of insurgencies, and troops bogged down trying to fight an enemy on his own turf. Or at least I thought we all knew that until we got the Bush gang in office. Apparently they don't know any rules but the ones they've made up in their own heads. They obviously missed out on the lessons learned in Vietnam, but wait, of course they did! Five-Deferment Cheney and Mr. My-Daddy-Got-Me-In-The-Air-National-Guard President were just too busy living their lives while our soldiers sacrificed theirs. They didn't learn one damn thing from that debacle because they didn't have to go through it. And as for actually listening to generals or military men who would know, well, Bush already has showed he only listens to those who just say "yes" to him.

Ciao for now, El Postino

Daze of '47

Today was a Utah state holiday, Pioneer Day, or as we know it around these here parts, the Days of '47. It commemorates the day in 1847 when the Mormon pioneers topped the mountains, looked down at the Great Salt Lake valley, and Brigham Young said, "This isn't the place, drive on to San Diego." No, I'm lying. That's what I wish he'd said. I could have been born in Southern California. As it was, he's reported to have said, "This is the place," and my ancestors ended up in landlocked Utah.

Pioneer Day kicks off the hottest two weeks of the summer, although it's hard to imagine how it could get any hotter than it has been. Yesterday in my hometown of Sandy it was 107º. Today officially it was 99º. Hey, we’re not setting any records, so we gotta try harder! Let's get that temperature up a few degrees. In this election year we can get our local Republicans running for re-election to Senate and Congress to kick start their usual campaigning, enlarging the ozone layer, melting glaciers in the Arctic with the hot, fetid air and poisonous, gaseous emissions from their mouths. That ought to get the temperature up to around 125º or higher. I'll keel over dead from heat exhaustion, and I won't have to put up with either the heat or re-election bullshit.

*******

I have already mentioned my granddaughter's baptism yesterday, but failed to mention that when we left the church we headed for breakfast at Village Inn and passed a sign outside a local Baptist church that said GOD LESS AMERICA. I wasn't sure if that was a missing "B" or an editorial comment.

*******

And speaking of babies, our son's childhood friend, Elizabeth, had her first baby girl just one hour after our son's wife had their second baby girl. We got a chance to visit with Elizabeth, her mom and dad, and the baby, Alexana, on Saturday.

Elizabeth's Alexana, top; our Gabby, bottom.

Elizabeth's dad, Carl, was there. Carl is quite a character. He's a man in his early 60s who just can't hold a job. He's a nice enough guy, but I think his religious devotion may hold him back. He's a truck driver who can't work around other guys that are, in his word, "vulgar." In other words, all the other truck drivers in the world. Carl got a new job a week or so ago driving deliveries for a pallet manufacturing business. Carl is one of these guys who always has ideas. He was complaining about his footgear, steel-toed safety shoes, being too hot in this excessive heat we've been experiencing. He showed us the shoes. He had taken a razor blade and cut out 1" sections of the shoes along the sides so they resembled sandals, except the steel toes were intact.

I looked at the shoes with amazement, while Elizabeth and her mom rolled their eyes. Who knows? The guy might just have something there, and maybe he should take out a patent. I didn't mention to him, though, my first thought: sure, it's hot now, but what about December and January?

Knowing Carl, though, he probably won't be working for the pallet company come December and January. Someone will make a dirty joke in his presence and he'll quit. People, no matter how religious they are, have just gotta lighten up. It's a big old sexy world out there, and other people can't be bothered by those who take easy offense to what is said.

You know the old saying, fuck 'em if they can't take a joke.

Ciao for now, El Postino

Baptism Day For Baby Gabby

Today, on a hot day in July, our granddaughter was baptized as Gabriela Uyen Nhu* Holman. We call her Gabby.

Father Thuy and Daddy David are partially hidden by the plant, but the rest of the family is eager to witness the baptism.

My wife and I aren't religious and not much for churchgoing, but our son became a Catholic, with our blessings, when he and his wife married in 2003. He has been very happy in the Vietnamese Catholic community. I usually just show up at his church for this type of special occasion, or for Easter or Christmas services. Having known Father Dominic Thuy now for about three years I can say he is one of the most dedicated clergymen I have met. Not only is he dedicated to his religion, but is a community and spiritual leader for his immigrant people, far from their home country. Waiting for the big moment are the godmother, the mom and baby, and the dad.

As our family grows, so does our love for each of them. We are most happy that Gabby, born just three weeks ago, is healthy, thriving, and now baptized. It was a really good day for us.

Ciao for now, El Postino

Grandma Sally and Gabby's mom, Loan, in the lobby after the service. Gabby never woke up at any time. I guess she missed the significance of the occasion!

*Near as I can tell from my son's explanation, her middle name is, by custom, her first name in Vietnamese, so in American she's Gabriella, to the Vietnamese she's Uyen Nhu, which is pronounced U-Win Nyoo. I hope that's close to the pronunciation, anyway.

Be good in church! Someone is watching.

Grandma Sally and Gabby's sister Bella wait for the ceremony to start.

The Weirdest Of Them All...

VINTAGE PAPERBACKS

I hadn't heard of H. P. Lovecraft or Weird Tales before picking up these books off the stands in the 1960s. I just thought they had great covers, and I've always been interested in anthologies.

Weird Tales was a magazine which had a lifespan of just over 30 years, from 1923 to 1954. Farnsworth Wright was editor for about half its run, during the latter part of the 1920s until a few months before he died in 1940. It was during his tenure as editor that the issues that are so desirable to collectors today were published. As an editor, Farnsworth Wright was described as quirky, and one writer described him as claiming his editorial policy was to have no editorial policy, which could explain why the quality of each issue could vary from story to story. He was also known for rejecting stories and then asking for them to be resubmitted, not a tactic designed to endear any editor to any writer.

The first book of Lovecraft stories I ever read is The Dunwich Horror And Others, from 1963, which reprints some of Lovecraft's better stories, including the title story, "Rats In The Walls," and "Pickman's Model," which I think are genuinely creepy stories despite the florid, outdated writing style (outdated even when he wrote them). I think the cover leaves something to the imagination. Why the tortured look on the character's half-hidden face, what are those disembodied arms in the air? It makes for some disturbing interpretations.

Weird Tales (the Pyramid Books compilation) has a publication date of May, 1964, so I picked this book up when I was a junior in high school. It contains "Pigeons From Hell," by Robert E. Howard, which scared me, and me a hotshot 17-year-old! I described the story to my friends and they said, "Oh yeah…that was on Thriller." (An anthology television series hosted by Boris Karloff.) To this day I haven't seen that episode and wonder how I missed it in the first place.A follow-up volume, Worlds Of Weird, is listed as being published in January, 1965. There are some genuinely fine stories in this volume, including "Valley Of The Worm" by Robert Howard (by then I was very familiar with Howard's work, having searched out some of his Conan the Barbarian stories), "He That Hath Wings" by the perennial favorite Edmond Hamilton, and "Roads," by Seabury Quinn, which is a straight-faced Weird Tales-style biography of Santa Claus!

These books caught my eye with their great covers by a true master, Virgil Finlay. I was familiar with Finlay from seeing pulps magazine illustrations he had done, specifically from Famous Fantastic Mysteries, a fine anthology magazine in its own right, which mainly reprinted classic material. The volume, The Spell of Seven, (unfortunately, my copy is damaged) with a publication date of June, 1965, was edited by L. Sprague De Camp, but reprinted only two stories from Weird Tales, "The Dark Eidolon" by Clark Ashton Smith, and "Shadows In Zamboula" by Howard. De Camp went on to make an industry out of Robert E. Howard's stories, including the Conan books which he edited and some he even co-wrote.These books opened the door to a world of wonder to me, and have led to a lifelong fascination with Weird Tales, a magazine I believe will only grow in reputation even as the existing copies become brittle and crumble to dust.

I think 100 years from now people will still read H. P. Lovecraft, Robert Bloch, Robert E. Howard and others of the famous stable of Weird Tales writers of the 1930s. It was one of the most specialized pulp magazines of all time, and was never a big selling magazine, often on the verge of bankruptcy, which just adds to its mystique.

Ciao for now, El Postino

Mickey Spillane Puts The Hammer Down

Mickey Spillane is dead at age 88.

I only have two Spillane books, both first editions: My Gun Is Quick, a Signet original from 1950, and Tomorrow I Die, a compilation of Spillane's short fiction, published by Mysterious Press in 1984.

Tomorrow I Die has the advantage of a really nifty dust jacket illustration by Jim Steranko, which anticipates the look of Frank Miller's Sin City series of graphic novels. I'm also including the biographical piece from the back cover of My Gun Is Quick, which claimed that Spillane had "25 cats." I visualize him trying to pound out a chapter with several cats climbing over and sitting on his typewriter while he worked. That information belies the two-fisted, hardboiled image of his books. Spillane's most popular character, Mike Hammer, was a violent, tough private eye on the side of the law. Kinda. He was an anti-hero with heroic tendencies. The books had 1950s sex scenes (i.e., the bedroom door closed just before the hot stuff), killings, beatings, all the fun sleaze of early paperback books.

Spillane inspired a fine writer, Max Allan Collins, who more than anyone kept Spillane's name out there. As far as I'm concerned, the student outdid the master long ago, and it was due to Collins that I read Spillane at all.

I remember seeing a TV interview with Spillane years ago where he said, "I write what I like to read." Apparently a lot of people liked to read what he wrote.

'Bye-bye, Mickey.

Ciao for now, El Postino

The Paranoid Squint

For years I worked with a guy I called Whispering Willie. When we were inside our building Willie spoke In a hushed whisper. He usually talked of conspiracies by our employers against us as a group or against him.

Finally, after several years of this I asked why he whispered inside yet talked in a normal voice when he got outside the building. He glanced up at some radiant heating units that were suspended from the ceiling. "Ain't them things microphones?" he asked.

Willie thought that everything the employees said was being piped right into our bosses' offices. Why anyone would want to listen to us was up for conjecture, but on Willie's part that was paranoia, of course. In those days I didn't recognize it like I do today, but I didn't read body language as well, either. When Willie spoke in that whisper he moved in close and his eyes narrowed into what I came to call the paranoid squint. I noticed that often when people talked of subjects that made them paranoid they often narrowed their eyes, and looked furtively side-to-side, making sure no one could overhear what they were about to say.

Over the weekend I watched a really great old time noir film, Detour(1945) which is famous for being made so cheap (reputedly $66,000) in six days of filming. It's also a classic of paranoia, which is what the best noir is. It's actually one of the great themes of movies and literature, too, that someone is after the main character. Usually it's a murderer, but oftentimes it's the police, or "the government," or especially a government agency which is mysterious to us, like the CIA. Detour is more about events beyond his control propelling the main character into a paranoid nightmare, and has several incidents of one character being suspicious of another--and for good reasons, too.

The 1940s and early 1950s were good for telling this type of story, because of the way the world changed after World War II. Paranoia is nothing new. I'm sure that 50,000 years ago Og was paranoid about his brother, Zog, conking him with a stone ax while he slept, and taking over the whole cave and all of the women.

In real life we dismiss peoples' paranoid fears* as fears without justification, but in fiction paranoia is a great plot device, and the mysterious "they" chasing the main character are very real.

Some early paperback authors, Jim Thompson and David Goodis, were great at telling this sort of story. Going back even earlier, Cornell Woolrich, who also wrote as William Irish, was excellent. You wonder whether it takes a paranoid to tell a paranoid's story.

Detour is good because the paranoia is real. The main character is looking for an old girlfriend and becomes caught up in a swirl of events beyond his control, and gets in deeper and deeper with every scene. He and his leading lady also give each other the paranoid squint, which is a dead giveaway.

Ciao for now, El Postino

*It's hard not to be paranoid about our government nowadays, with all of the technology making it easy for them to look in on us when we don't know it.

Heat Is For The Birds

It's too hot. It's 104ºF outside today. It usually gets this hot in Salt Lake City on average about four or five days a summer, but we've had summers where we've racked up a lot of days at 100º or higher.

How can people stand to live in places where temperatures like this are common? Like Dallas/Ft Worth, Las Vegas, Phoenix, or Tucson, for chrissake. Stand still too long on a sidewalk and watch your feet catch fire. Or your hair.

I know this probably doesn't qualify as global warming, but it's too damn hot for me.

It's 77º inside my little suburban house right now, not uncomfortable, and not bad for cooling from an evaporative cooler, like I've used since we moved here in 1975. I figure if it's at least 20º cooler inside than outside then I'm doing all right. All around me people (including my son) have switched to whole-house comfort systems, furnace and air conditioning all in one. I've heard that people usually love it until they get their first electric bill…then they love it again once they've gotten over the sticker shock; or at least turn it up a few degrees to try to keep the cost manageable. My swamp cooler uses about as much electricity as a light bulb; we never even notice it on our power bill.

This morning I looked out at my overgrown lawn and decided to crank up my old Sears Craftsman mower. I waited until about 8:45 a.m., when it was still cool enough to work outside, but not early enough to wake my neighbors on a lazy summer Saturday morning. First thing that happened after the usual tugs and cursing that accompany starting the old beast, was that the belt broke on the self-propel drive. I swore a few more mighty oaths and then ended up just pushing the mower to cut the grass. God, what a pussy I've become. When I was a kid I mowed my parents' lawn twice a week, going over front and back lawns twice each time I mowed them, for $1.00 a week, and I used an old-fashioned push mower. No motor a'tall. Nowadays if parents made a kid do that he'd have them thrown into jail for child abuse.

Of course, this morning after pushing the Sears Craftsman (a lot heavier than a push mower), I came inside and waited for signs of a heart attack. When no cardiac arrest happened I figured it was time to go shopping.

My wife is gone for the weekend, taking care of her brother's pets, and the older of our two granddaughters. She's having a ball, sitting in a newly remodeled, fully air-conditioned house, in a cool basement family room, on a new sofa, watching a 52" TV. Rough job! I hope she gets extra money for the deplorable working conditions.

What this means is that I have to do my own cooking and feeding myself. That's easy; I'm a guy. That means junk food, easy to fix stuff, like microwave pizza. I told you I was a pussy. No standing over a stove for me. Why cook in this heat when there are so many things you can just pop into the micro for five minutes?

When I walked into the local Albertson's supermarket I saw a bird, a magpie, sitting on the ice machine. A store employee yelled, "Don't scare him!" then got on the loudspeaker to say, "Josiah, he's on the ice machine." I saw who I assumed to be Josiah approaching, a teenage bagger holding what looked like a butterfly net. The whole time I was in the store poor Josiah couldn't catch that bird. I overheard a checker tell a customer that the bird got in through the loading dock door. At one point all of the lights went off and the manager got on the loudspeaker to tell the customers that everything was working, they were just trying to get the bird to go to the light of the open doors. Apparently that didn't work because while groping my way through the dark aisles looking for the canned peaches I'd hear the voices of different employees making announcements, "Josiah, he's on the magazines." "Josiah, he's on the medicine." "Josiah, he's in the cereal aisle." I left the store thinking of all the jobs to have, one of the strangest would have to be bird wrangler in a supermarket.

Ciao for now, El Postino

The Girl Most Likely...

VINTAGE PAPERBACKS

I found these books in a Powell's Books kiosk at the Portland, Oregon Airport in June, 2005, and they cost me a whopping 25¢ apiece!

In the early 1950s Gold Medal Books ran a series on famous murder trials, all featuring the word "Girl" in the title. It was an interesting series, and produced at least one best seller that I know of, The Girl In The Red Velvet Swing, about the murder of turn-of-the-Twentieth Century architect Stanford White by Harry K. Thaw for the love of Evelyn Nesbit. It was even made into a movie.

Three of these covers are by an artist named Barye, of whom I know absolutely nothing. He used an earth-tone palette, with lots of browns and greens. I find it gives these covers, greatly reduced from the original art, a muddy look. I've seen it on other Gold Medal books, and it might have been a personal preference of the art director. In the early 1950s with a lot of paperback covers looking garish and pulp magazine-styled, hoping to catch the eye of the consumer, the more muted tones of these Gold Medal covers might have stood out.

Book #9, Girl On The Lonely Beach, is a departure, using a photograph with posed models.

My favorite of the four is The Girl In The House Of Hate by Charles and Louise Samuels. The Lizzie Borden case, along with Jack The Ripper and a few others, still has interest for the public, and every few years someone comes out with a new book "solving" this century-old crime. The cover of House of Hate is eerie, a visualization of the moment before the events told in the old children's rhyme: "Lizzie Border took an ax and gave her mother forty whacks. When she saw what she had done she gave her father forty-one."

The cover of The Girl On The Gallows might be a portrait of an actress. Maybe Susan Hayward? Book publishers weren't above using movie stars as unauthorized models on their covers. Marilyn Monroe's image was used in an unauthorized manner several times.

Someday someone ought to reprint these books. In today's more sensitive political climate, though, they'd have to substitute the word "woman" for "girl."

Ciao for now, El Postino

Midway Between a 49er and a 69er

The other day a local newspaper sports columnist wrote an article on Leroy "Satchel" Paige, the great Negro League baseball pitcher who went on to a newly integrated Major League toward the end of his career. Among sayings attributed to Paige are, "Never look behind you. There might be somebody gaining on you." (Here at the Paranoia Strikes Deep blog we like to say, "Always look behind you, because there is somebody gaining on you.")

But that isn't the only thing Paige said. He also said, "How old would you be if you didn't know how old you were?" Hmmm. Fair question, and my answer would be, sometimes I feel twenty years younger than my years, sometimes exactly what I think I should feel like at my age, and sometimes I feel more like my mother's age.

My 59^th birthday was Saturday, and the annual ritual of cards, birthday presents, a little party with pie and ice cream (we're iconoclasts here…no birthday cakes). I enjoyed my birthday, except it was the last one of my fifties, and now I'm facing--choke, gag--my sixties. There was a big deal made out of Bush turning 60, and the others of us baby boomers of the 1940's hitting that 60 mark. They like to point to people like Bush and Clinton, actresses like Cher, Susan Sarandon, Goldie Hawn, as examples of people who look great in middle-age. Ah, bullshit. Those actresses have lots of plastic surgeons to thank, lots of time with personal trainers, too. For the rest of us who can't afford plastic surgery or even time in the gym, 60 means a paunch in front, bags under the eyes, lines in the face, gray hairs where the dark hairs used to be…if we have any hairs left, that is.

I went to see my dermatologist the other day. After years of working in the sun I go to him about once a year to check for any suspicious growths. I'm pretty good at keeping up with things like that. My doctor is a few years older than me and like me has hair growing out of places where you wouldn't think it would grow, and that's despite losing hair where it's supposed to grow. As he put it, "I am convinced we're all turning into werewolves."

We boomers like to kid ourselves. We like to say, "Sixty is the new 40!" but I seem to remember them saying, "Fifty is the new 40!" so I guess it will follow that as we move along however many decades we have left we'll be saying things like, "Seventy is the new 40!" or "Eighty is the new 40!" Did I say we kid ourselves? No, we lie to ourselves.

I guess we have to keep track of our birthdays. It's important to keep a record. People need to know birthdays so they can judge when a person is an adult. The watershed year when I turned 21 was 1968, which was a pretty eventful year in our country's history. By far my personal best decade started when I turned 40, and according to my fellow boomers I'll get a chance to repeat it when I turn "the new 40" at age 60.

Right now I'm sort of hanging on by my fingernails, not wanting to give up anything I've gained, especially knowledge or whatever wisdom I might have collected in the dusty file cabinets of my brain, and not turn into a memoryless person like my mother. That's true paranoia, folks. My wife's family all worry about cancer, which I admit is a pretty big worry (and why I go to my dermatologist every year), but I'm paranoid about getting Alzheimer's…

…where was I? Oh yeah. We were talking about aging, weren't we? About losing our minds? Jeez, my short-term memory has gotten shorter. Anyway, if we can say that "Sixty is the new 40!" then it should follow that "Fifty-nine is the new 39!" So I've joined the Jack Benny club, and if you remember Jack Benny it gives you automatic membership in that club with me.

Ciao for now, El Postino

A really fun card done by my talented pal, Dave Miller. For a large image click here. Through the marvel of modern special effects, Thrilling Birthday Stories features El Postino as the Evil Elves!