Cold Morphs To Bronchitis

22 Friday Feb 2019

Posted by in Health Issues

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Wherein I bewail the lingering nature of a common cold and castigate myself for being a mere mortal.

I am sitting here, fearful I will become permanently attached to my rather nice leather recliner with matching foot stool. The cold that began Monday morphed into bronchitis and a general feeling of fatigue. Yuck. I took some Guafenisin and hopefully that will help in clearing my bronchii. It is in the form of a 12 hour combination medicine with pseudoepinephrine, which usually gets me drowsy. We shall see.

I am doing some trainspotting, although most of the trains scheduled to pass through Ashland around this time have already gone by.

My body is in rest and recover mode. I am vain enough to take this a personal defeat. Being sick is not a failure on my part. Why is that so hard to grasp? (Is this a male ego thing?)

I am now going to have fun. Some DVD’s, maybe Maria Beatty’s The Elegant Spanking would be fun. Perhaps, just NC-17 rated Henry and June is in order. I could watch the documentary Paris Was A Woman and limit my viewing to general cultural improvement. First though, CARTOONS!

Later Loves 💘

Friday

22 Friday Feb 2019

Posted by in Uncategorized

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I find myself awake and I wonder why. Feelings drift in. Fatigue. Boredom. Yearning. Love.

I have warm thoughts for the people in my life, even those I know only through the cyberworld.

I should go back to bed.

Bedtime

22 Friday Feb 2019

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I’ve been picking at the last few blog posts I have made as if they were scabs on an old and almost healed wound. I don’t know what else to do. I really am tired. I want to get back to the pool tomorrow, cold or no cold. I need to buy more fruit. And rice crackers, the staples of Life Itself.

I am watching plus size Brazilian models show off women’s underwear. I know, I’m creepy for watching this, but the body positivity is not some idea offered by the pop psychologists. Here are big women who are wearing nice looking underwear. And people are deciding if other big women will buy this underwear so they can feel good about being big. Kinda like why I buy and wear flannel boxers because they feel good and I feel good wearing them. I know there are women out there who wear flannel boxers, because they feel good when they wear them. If they had a flannel boxer YT channel I would watch that, most likely. Beats the s#×t out of homicide stories on Lifetime.

But it’s late. Good night.

Sailor Bob

22 Friday Feb 2019

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Doggone it. I am tired. I am almost over The Cold. I did some sleeping, putting everything on hold til I felt better. Don’t know how smart a strategy that was.

Those of us of a certain age In the Richmond VA area remember Sailor Bob, host of a children’s show on local television in the Fifties and Sixties. It was the Golden Age of local television programming. Sailor Bob on the Channel 12 Schooner, sponsored by Nolde’s Bread, Virginia Dairy (The Home of Better Milk) and Pepsi Cola, hosted Popeye cartoons. Sailor Bob also did drawings. It was wonderful innocent fun. We didn’t know that Popeye cartoons dealt in mean-spirited ethnic, racist and sexist stereotypes. It took later years and education (indoctrination) to become “sensitive”.

“Sailor Bob” has died at age 85. His real name was Bob Griggs. He was a good man, a television pioneer from the days when TV was novel, if not particularly exciting.

Today, with computers managing everything and ownership by megacorporations, a station is driven even more by ratings, advertising revenues and a need not to offend the numerous pressure groups barking like hounds at any and every gesture and statement that might kinda, sorta be controversial, television is about as interesting as a trip to the gas station.

But at that time, here was an adult that wasn’t trying to teach us something or tell us to sit up straight.

Like you said at the end of the show. “Here’s wishing you fair weather and smooth sailing.”

Power

21 Thursday Feb 2019

Posted by in Politics

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,

There is a story, perhaps apocryphal but I doubt it, that former House Speaker, Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill, when asked what he missed most about holding elected office, replied with two words, “The power.”

This is what politics is all about. Power. That is how friends are rewarded, enemies punished.

So whenever some politician talks about “public service”, I immediately know he or she is lying. How many politicians go to City Hall, the State House, or Congress with the intention of putting limits on their power? Very few, I fancy.

And human behavior has changed very little since 1787, when those much-maligned “dead white men” outlined a model for governance that defined, delineated, and limited the power of government.

Fool proof, almost. Except for the money part. Limited government meant the economy could and would grow independently of the hand and control of government. Then the politicians discovered that not only could they tax an always resistant populace, but they could borrow from  unbelievably wealthy individuals and banks and distribute this largesse through contracts, grants, and handouts to corporations, institutions, and individuals. The rich liked the interest income and relative safety of the loans.The politicians could buy loyalty and with that loyalty purchased with government funds came power. Power became entrenched. Robert Byrd (D-WV) made sure federal money went to West Virginia and West Virginians kept re-electing him.

The trick, for the politician, is to make one’s self look noble while doing this. The politician is merely “addressing the needs of his constituents”. Yep. You betcha. In Virginia, for example, the politicians are strong advocates for national defense. This keeps people in the Tidewater area and the DC suburbs employed and more than a few get rich. After all, we need national defense. And they keep voting for incumbents.

It also helps to buy off the artists, writers, performers, composers, and actors, under the public-spirited heading of  “funding for the Arts”. It worked for Roosevelt in the New Deal. The artist types want to be in the vanguard, so they sell their integrity to be allied with “progressive” politicians.

Anybody who comes along wanting to disturb this dynamic will be vilified.

That’s all I am going to say.

Imagining The Story’s End

21 Thursday Feb 2019

Posted by in History

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I was asleep. The overheated bedroom woke me up. Then I got to thinking and my mind got …hungry. Not for food, but for images, from which spun ideas. YouTube is quite good at feeding the hunger. Every image is a banquet. In just the course of a few minutes, I saw a home movie of Germans in the Rheinland, around Easter time in 1939. They act oblivious to the cyclone forming in their midst. These good burghers in their Sunday best would be, as it would turn out, enjoying their last Easter in peacetime for seven years. How many of these men would be alive in 1946?

There were moving pictures of a society fête in Paris in 1928. There are musicians, dressed as gauchos, performing. For these partygoers, the Depression awaits, and political instability that made France oblivious to the monster awakening, East of the Maginot Line,

An English county fair in 1902 shows aristocrats enjoying the day. Downton Abbey is over a century away. The clothing in these pictures aren’t costumes. The people actually dressed this way. We must use our olfactory imaginations to get a sense of the smells. Bathing in this time was quite the impractical experience, heating the water, filling the tub. Sweat, from bodies, manure, from horses, filled the air.

I see a picture of a boy, age seven or so, at this fair in 1902. Would he later join the British Army in a pals’ regiment, dying at the Somme with his friends, members of, say, the Bradford Chums?

We can only imagine how the stories end. The camera will run out of film long before the end.

Evening Reflections

19 Tuesday Feb 2019

Posted by in Gratitude

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I’m sitting in the leather recliner, reflecting on a satisfying day. I did the usual stuff, AA, swim at the Y, made the black bean/quinoa vegan chili and am generally satisfied with the result. I need to perhaps adjust the spices; it’s a little too sweet from the tomatoes

I visited my AA buddy recovering from a stroke. I had fun justify sitting with him and his girlfriend, listening to Classic Country music, Johnny Cash and his contemporaries.

I have congestion and a running nose. I could sleep too. Life is good.

Later Loves 💘