Month: May 2025

Meanwhile Fifty Year Later

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Six down, one to go.  A fourteen-hour day just ended.  It went better than I expected.  It did end in failure and will have to be repeated in June but that’s a story for another day.  The main thing is I didn’t crash and burn in the middle and if I get through tomorrow, which will be easier than today, I can relax through my root canal or tooth extraction or whatever other dental horror story occurs on Thursday.

And I was completely isolated from the outside world today.  I don’t know whether aliens landed from the Andromeda galaxy and cured Joe Biden’s cancer and started flights of humans to their world based on a book whose title will eventually be translated to mean “To Serve Biden” (it’s a cookbook!).  I looked at the headlines tonight briefly and I couldn’t find anything of note but maybe I’m just tired.

While I was gone, I put Camera Girl in charge.  But the dogs know she is a pushover and they ran amok terrorizing her and just trampling her attempts to maintain order at the Compound.  It’s an old story.  She is acknowledged to be the world’s least effective dog owner.  She spoiled these dogs and now they neither fear no respect her.  I could restore order but what’s the use.  She refuses to discipline them in any meaningful way.  She just screams at them without any result.  But all of this is irrelevant.  Tomorrow is a day fraught with great significance.  Exactly fifty years ago tomorrow I first laid eyes on Camera Girl when she was just a seventeen-year-old babe at the beach in Brooklyn.

That day was an example of fate.  Neither of us was supposed to be at the beach that day.  And neither of us had ever met.  And just by the sheerest accident we each had a friend that knew each other and who had planned to meet at the beach.  So, by third hand luck we met and hit it off.  And now fifty years later we’re still keeping company and trying to figure out what the heck we’re going to do to keep this crazy merry-go-round twirling for a little while longer.

Fifty years is a considerable amount of time.  It’s basically my entire adult life.  The friend who knew her friend is long dead but still comes to mind from time to time because he may have been the funniest human being I’ve ever met.  I guess humor isn’t a good predictor of human success or even survival.  It is a very strange world we live in.  The unlikeliest chance can have a profound impact and steer the course of our whole life.

But all kinds of chance exist.  I had assumed we would celebrate our big day with some enjoyable event at our favorite restaurant.  But instead, I’ve got two chores to take care of and then I’m waiting on a root canal the next day that won’t let me enjoy food for a while.

What’s the expression?  You’ve got to take the good with the bad.  Well, that’s a crummy expression!  But also, very true.  Oh well.  It was a great day at the beach fifty years ago.  And there will be more great days to come.  So, on with the show.

Waiting for Friday

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Five down, two to go.  And tomorrow is the killer.  Well, here goes nothing.

I was gonna review, “The Fifth Element.”  I hadn’t seen it in a long time so I couldn’t remember my overall impression.  Well, I rewatched and remembered.  It’s a movie that has a few “elements” that are interesting or fun but there are enough factors that are awful to make the sum negative.  Gary Oldman has a small but pivotal part as a villain and as always, he is great fun.  Bruce Willis plays Bruce Willis as he always does and he has a few fun moments but it’s a very silly movie so he can only succeed at moments.  The movie itself is a live action fairy tale/cartoon with very broad humor and very wooden characters.  Chris Tucker’s character was among the most bizarre.  But in fairness he was also one of the funnier aspects of this comedy(?).

I’m sure some folks will enjoy this exercise in science fiction fairy tale but I have to give it a thumbs down.  There were just too many annoying factors to allow me to wholeheartedly embrace it.

So, President Trump is really playing up the international agenda this month.  Even his enemies are intrigued by his efforts to talk to the Iranians and normalize our situation with the Arabs.  Of course, the pundits on the Left were horrified by Trump’s speech where he said he is backing away from nation-building and demanding the Middle East adhere to Western mores and customs.  But from my way of looking at it, that’s exactly the message we should be putting forward.  “You live your way in your country and we’ll live ours over here.”  Seems reasonable to me.  But Capon and Books got the vapors hearing it.

As for his efforts to get a ceasefire in Ukraine, I tend to doubt it will come to anything.  The Russians don’t want to give the Ukrainians a breather.  Apparently, they’ve calculated that they will finish off enough Ukrainians before the Ukrainians finish off enough Russians so that Kiev’s defense will collapse this year.  The question is whether Trump has the sense to just walk away from the whole thing and let it end sooner than later.  But looking at the tiny geographic gains that account for thousands of deaths a week on both sides is gut-churning.  Well, I don’t see any change before the fall.

As for the fact that Joe Biden has some kind of cancer; well, he’s eighty-two.  Is it surprising at that age that cancer has come on the scene?  I think as we get older that possibility becomes more real every day.  The only question I have is when did he actually get the diagnosis?  Three, four years ago?  Well, I don’t celebrate his ill-health but I consider him an evil man and maybe this is a good time for him to think about his finish and maybe consider making amends.

I saw that James Comey was trying to get his name back in the news by acting like a moron.  In my youth in Brooklyn, we would have described someone like that as a lousy scumbag.  And that would be playing it down.  I think having the IRS audit him a few times just for fun would be very appropriate.  Just a thought.

Well, that’s enough for today.  Waiting for Friday.

In Pursuit of the Pursuit of Happiness

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People say that one of the unique components of the American experiment was the explicit enumeration of “the pursuit of happiness” in the founding document of the country.  And that’s true but I think the more important situation is that to a much greater degree than elsewhere it actually was captured.  I’d say that the capture of happiness is the much discussed “American Dream.”

And I’ll go further; I’ll say that without the happiness there isn’t anything worth discussing about America.  The essence of this country is that it delivered on the dream.  People who came here and put in the effort found actual happiness.  And what was that happiness?  In the last hundred and fifty years it was middle class status which means the wherewithal to raise a family above the poverty line.  The definition of poverty has shifted over the centuries.  Of late it means being able to afford shelter, food, clothes, education, communication, entertainment and transportation costs for a family of four.  And nowadays that’s quite a bit.

But the general idea is that you make enough money to bring up your kids to be able to walk among equals in the town you live in.  And that is the definition of happiness for normal human beings.  And except for economic catastrophes like the Great Depression that expectation was within reach of even penniless immigrants who arrived here without even a command of the English language.  But that situation is no longer the case.  The younger generation are of the opinion that a middle-class lifestyle for them is an impossibility.  And I contend that is why Donald Trump has twice been elected president.

It’s not as if Gen Z likes his looks or rhetoric.  He’s the ultimate example of the man to whom they’d say, “Okay boomer.”  His views on women and foreigners are considered uncouth by the young.  But he’s promised to fix the economy so that they can afford to be grown-ups and move out of their parents’ basements.  So, the real question is; can he do it?

Boy, I wish I knew the answer to this one.  Sure, I want the answer to be yes.  But it’s a lot easier to move an industrial base to a new country when labor costs are effectively zero than it is to rebuild it in a place where labor costs and environmental regulations are huge negatives.  It may be that he won’t get enough time to rebuild it.  But that is the bet.  Donald Trump says he can restore the American Dream; restore the chance for a middle-class lifestyle for the majority of Americans.

I find it an amazing thing.  A man that everyone claims is just a flim-flam man and an opportunist has recognized that our present disastrous state is the result of the failure of the most fundamental characteristic of America; happiness.  And diagnosed its remedy as restoring the means of a middle-class lifestyle to the common man.  I think a case could be made that he’s the only one in politics who isn’t an opportunist.