Fiscal Madness and Buffalo Bill

So last week I was shoveling snow and now I read that it’s going to be 80 degrees on Saturday.  That’s messed up.  But this is Dunwich and we’ve never restricted ourselves to reality.  Okay, I’ve been griping about the cold weather so I better shut up and enjoy it.  And I will.  We’re hosting Easter on Sunday and that will be pretty great.  We have Princess Sack of Potatoes here tonight.  Her parents are celebrating an occasion and we gladly invited her over.  Tonight, she watched “Stuart Little.”  I was busy but I popped in and saw a few minutes of the movie here and there.  Geena Davis is one of the main characters and later on I saw Dabney Coleman playing a minor character.  And that activated a very old brain cell.  I recalled that a very young and pretty Geena Davis was the eye candy on a tv show that starred Dabney Coleman as the eponymous “Buffalo Bill.”  He was the host of a tv talk show and she was one of the production assistants.  I remember one episode where Bill explained to her that once a woman reached the age of twenty-five, she was over the hill and her face began to disintegrate.  When Geena asked whether this applied to men, the much older Bill said something like, “No, as unfair as it may seem, men remain pretty much the same decade after decade maybe even getting more handsome over time.”  His deadpan delivery, in your face offensiveness and outrageous non sequiturs were what made the show fun.

Tomorrow Camera Girl will continue the Princess’s training in the mysteries of holiday cooking.  She will assist in the baking of a ricotta cheese cake and various other Easter dishes.  The main course is roast beast and even in the midst of my endless drive to lose weight I will indulge to a greater extent than usual because, who are we kidding?  That’s not something you pass up in this age of $12/dozen eggs.

I was talking to one of my sons-in-law tonight about saving money.  He’s got two kids that will be in college next year and we were discussing automobiles.  His two main vehicles have 200,000+ miles each and I asked him how much he wants to get out of them.  He said 500,000!  Now if it weren’t him, I’d have scoffed at the idea.  These are American vehicles.  They don’t last that long.  But he’s an extremely capable mechanic.  He’s worked on everything from helicopters to lawn mowers and I’ve seen him bring piles of junk back to life so I just nodded my head and said, “Yeah we’ve all got to keep what we already have on the road as long as possible.”

I was at a Dunwich committee meeting.  The talk was what is going on in the state.  The Democrats are all freaked out.  They claim that Trump’s austerity measures will force them to declare a fiscal emergency and ignore all rules against excessively increasing taxes and other revenue sources.  They’re calling Trump a fascist, a Nazi, you name it.  Needless to say, the towns will be the ones taking the biggest hit.  All of the state mandates will become unfunded mandates and we’ll have to pay for them on our own.  At the end of the meeting, we all looked around and you could see everyone was thinking the same thing, “It is what it is.”  We all shrugged our shoulders and walked out.  Well, I’ll enjoy Easter and then we’ll take it day by day.  Ah, New England.