An old whiskered sidekick in a B-oater of yesteryear (think Gabby, Hayes or Johnson, or Fuzzy St. John -- he was the sidekick of Lash LaRue) was cooking a pot of something in one of the comic relief scenes where Roy or Bart or Lash wasn't chasing or shooting or fistfighting. Roy-Lash asked him what he was cooking. He said, "Southpaw stew." (Why do you call it that?) "Cause it's made of whatever's left." (Yuk yuk yuk!)
Which is my way of segueing into a potpourri, olio, olla podrida, slumgullion of this and that about everything and nothing. Mostly nothing. This week we visited friends at their home in Bay Village, Ohio, which is on Lake Erie. They are dear people and three of the four of us go back to MHS Class of '56 so we had plenty to reminisce about. They lost an adult daughter to cancer earlier this year and we talked about it and it was good and I hoped it helped them -- it helped us. We took a walk in a beautiful little park beside the lake and other than freezing our asses loved it. We went to Kohl's, which had a sale of 50% off on some items and 15% more off for seniors and we didn't buy a thing. (We can get the same thing at a much lesser "full" price elsewhere with no "discounts," way I see it.) We went to an Italian restaurant and had delicious chicken entrees. We dipped real bread in herbed olive oil, etc. The music was Sinatra, Dean Martin, etc. I expected Al Pacino to pop in. The atmosphere and service were great. It was an honest-to-god restaurant, for a change. We wandered through Ohio and Indiana on the way home.
I'd started to write a couple of other things for the blog and decided not to finish or post them. I wanted to comment on The Grapes of Wrath, which we finished reading and followed up by watching the 1941 movie with Henry Fonda, and I was writing a treatise on economics,which I know nothing about. It is a beautiful, elegiac book and I think its views of socioeconomics are still essentially true today. I also started to discuss an article by Paul Krugman in which he urged Democrats "not to make nice" with the opposition, as the Dixie Chicks sang in their first album after they'd been accused of treason for simply saying they are ashamed of the man who happens to be the president and then being subjected to a Krystallnacht of burning their CDs (incited by rightwing media owners, for the most part).
When we got back from Ohio we discovered that our candidates' yard signs were gone. I did a little Sipowicz work this morning and have some of the Franks Drive Irregulars on my short list of suspects. Nobody will 'fess up even though I don't want to get any kids in trouble. Yet I don't approve of that kind of vandalism. Bottom line: I'd rather it would be the kids with no political agenda than a Republican dirty trick.
Rosie's son, Brian, who is a volunteer firefighter, had a close friend die in a fire this past week. Firefighters from all around are going to attend the young man's funeral and Brian will be among them on Sunday. He obtained a pair of black firefighter's uniform trousers for the occasion and Rosie hemmed them for him.
Wouldn't it be nice if we could have campaigns in which the candidates seriously debated the issues and didn't have multimillion-dollar TV ads that distort the truth and smear their opponents -- because the big bucks were truly forbidden to pay for them?
Campaign finance reform, anyone?
2 comments:
I'd love to comment on campaign finance reform but you would probably get a lot of anonymous flack. Thank God, we can hope that after Tuesday we will not have so much negativism in the media. We can go back to blood and guts or as the say in "Blazing Saddles, '...rape, murder, arson and rape.'"
Arizona(!) has publicly financed elections. No PAC's, no soft money, no 527's (OK, they've probably got some of those), and when the pols take office, they're beholden to no one but the People, the ones who financed their campaigns.
Sounds like a fine idea-r to me.
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