All the Secrets of the Universe and Some Really Important Stuff Too!
I would define, in brief, the Poetry of words as the Rhythmical Creation of Beauty. Its sole arbiter is taste. With the intellect or with the conscience, it has only collateral relations. Unless incidentally, it has no concern whatever either with duty or with truth.
Edgar Allan Poe
So today was the weekly zoom call with the boys. Coincidentally, I received my “Del Boca Vista” tee shirt. One of the guys had them made up It says,
“Del Boca Vista
They don’t want us there
so we’re going.”
It captures the petty spiteful spirit of the Costanzas and honestly, I’ve always felt a kindred mean spirited impulse toward almost everything out there.
I wore it to the zoom and immediately sensed a greater respect from my fellow Deplorables.
I read off the Costanza rant verbatim,
“This is Frank Costanza. You think you can keep us out of Florida? We’re moving in lock, stock, and barrel. We’re gonna be in the pool. We’re gonna be in the clubhouse. We’re gonna be all over that shuffleboard court! And I dare you to keep me out!”
It was a proud moment. But we must move on.
So, everyone has been whining about Colbert getting the boot. The Democrats in Congress want to have Senate investigations to make sure Trump didn’t order the firing. Gee, if they could prove he was responsible I bet he’d hand out lists with almost every name in Hollywood and the networks including Tom Hanks, George Clooney and Alec Baldwin to start.
But finding out that the Late Show costs $100 million a year to produce and loses $46 million a year was hilarious. If ABC and NBC are losing anything close to those numbers, I’m guessing that Kimmel and Fallon will both be given the boot sometime soon. And that would leave Greg Gutfeld not only the highest rated show on late night but the only one.
And how about the View? Is that turkey actually making money for ABC. It’s kind of hard to believe. But then again maybe they don’t pay those demented hags much of any salary. I mean, why would you? They’re not actually celebrities. The closest they have to a star is Whoopi Goldberg who was in a couple of popular movies about a thousand years ago while she was still alive. Now she’s just one of the undead subsisting on the leftovers from the craft services table and sleeping upside down in an equipment storage closet on the set. I couldn’t imagine they pay people like Joy Behar, Sunny Hostin or Ana Navarro at all. I figure they just wandered on the set one at a time and became domesticated by the crew. I’m sure they’ve been taught a few stupid pet tricks over the years like a parrot learning to mimic human speech somewhat. It can be a fun trick but one soon tires of the irritating repetition of some catch phrase like “systemic racism” or “mansplaining.”
Well anyway, we’ll have to wait and see whether the other shoe drops and Jon Stewart is also given his walking papers by Paramount. Now granted, he doesn’t make $20 million a year like Colbert and his show doesn’t cost a $100 million dollars a year to make but maybe just so Colbert doesn’t feel picked on they should also heave Stewart overboard too. After all they’re old friends. They could keep each other company on the unemployment line.
Beauty is the sole legitimate province of the poem.
Edgar Allan Poe
There is an INTENSE need for people who can think and have experience + a work ethic, goal driven. I’m a subset of one out of 300 million+ so I can’t exactly extrapolate but—
Like photog, I’m an engineer but at 76.8 years old, a supposedly retired one. To keep myself in touch and engaged, I have a part time consulting business out of my house. I do design and in addition, construction contract and managing, budgeting and walk dogs on occasion.
I have people coming out of the woodwork begging me to work for them. They tell me that the current system isn’t generating people like me at the needed replacement rate.
I have all the clients I want (2), I work all the hours a week that I want (15) and I have no intention of getting back in harness. I like the commute from my bedroom to my home office but I have problems keeping the cats off my plan table.
Before retirement, we spent a couple of years trying to hire and train my replacement. A number of recent grads but there seemed to be at least something wrong with every one. No motivation, no work ethic, can’t get out of bed, not interested, HUGE holes in their knowledge base, scatter brained. One of them could not generate a simple logical excel based budget to save his life.
I can’t do the typical retired thing, traveling, visiting grandkids, etc. My wife is well into Alzheimer’s but not quite yet a nursing home candidate. So I’m tied here. But if I’m not working on something interesting, I’m pretty sure I would rapidly dry up and blow away.
In a very real sense, the world that anyone of us who’s over fifty grew up in no longer exists except as a memory and a reference point by which to reckon the current acceleration of change. Things like newspapers, television advertising, most brick-and-mortar stores and even paper money effectively don’t exist anymore. The whole of life in the most prosperous nation on the planet has been upended in such a way that it has disrupted every facet of life. Young people aren’t getting well-paying jobs in the numbers needed to sustain institutions like marriage, parenthood and homeownership.
The truth is the tech revolution threatens to destroy the way of life in this country by eliminating the need for a good chunk of the jobs formerly filled by the American middle-class. This is a crisis that is orders of magnitude greater than when the industrial revolution introduced mechanical power to replace horses, typewriters replaced scribes and oil displaced wood and coal as fuels. There are millions of people who grew up in middle-class families who live in their parents’ basements, and can’t make enough money to move out, and have no prospects of having families of their own. Think about that.
Donald Trump wants to make America great again. The only way that can happen is to figure out how to provide gainful employment for the majority of Americans. This country only became powerful because the majority of its citizens existed above the poverty line. If that ceases to be the case we will see a revolution here.
Trump’s solution is to reshore manufacturing jobs that had been sent to Asia. There are a lot of questions associated with that idea. How quickly can it be done? How many jobs will there be. How well will they pay? Of course I don’t claim to have all the answers. In fact, no one does. But I have the sense that he’s on the right track. Manufacturing has been an enormous engine for bringing places like China, Vietnam and India out of the depths of poverty and into at least the “second world.” All that is really necessary is for U.S. industrial policy to include sufficient positive and negative incentives for American companies (and German and Japanese and Taiwanese and Korean) to move their manufacturing operations back here.
In a real sense this is an inflection point for this country. We won’t stay where we currently are. The old economy and those who worked in it are going away. Either we replace what’s here with a restored industrial landscape or we allow the future to be stolen from our children and grandchildren and watch America turn into a feudal state with haves and have-nots sharply separated into a small aristocracy and a large but shrinking underclass of underemployed surplus human beings.
I’m betting Trump can do it. He’s broken the hold on things that the Deep State previously had and he’s getting things done. If he can avoid being assassinated in the next three and a half years, he has the potential to save this wonderful place.
Years of love have been forgot
In the hatred of a minute.
Edgar Allan Poe
Congress passed the 2025 Rescission Bill last Friday. And that was on the final day allowed under the special rules for a rescission bill. What isn’t as well publicized is that President Trump has not yet signed the bill into law
The Apocalypse of Legacy Media
“All government funding for PBS and NPR, including their local affiliates, has been eliminated by recent Congressional votes. Trump has not yet signed the rescissions package into law, but it has been sent to his desk for signature after final passage by Congress. This will lead to a significant reduction in local programming; however, it is believed that national programming will survive due to other revenue streams.”
Now I find this very annoying. I’ve been waiting on this sign-off for the better part of four days. Maybe Trump plans a special signing ceremony and some kind of celebratory gesture; possibly slaughtering an ostrich made up to look like Big Bird and then roasting it on a spit over a coal fired stove.
Well, let’s hope this delay is over soon.
Only a single week of July left. One last draught of fiery perfection. Drink deep the heat and light and dark of real summer. The lightning bugs flash from the grass and trees and trigger memories of a young boy collecting those living phosphors and watching them far into the night. Where do those memories reside in my old brain? What other memories do they trigger? People who have been gone from this world for decades. But I can still hear their voices and see their expressions. Kind and cruel, smart and slow, funny and humorless, warm and cold, sane and mad. And all these traits mixed in many combinations and proportions. All those summer nights, all those years ago.
All those parties and occasions where we talked about the future and all the things we wanted to do and all we hoped to achieve. And some of it we did. And some of it worked out as we hoped. But so many things fell by the wayside and some spectacularly so. But those of us left must keep moving forward because there is no other way. We just keep time to the beat of the days and seasons ticking by cycle after cycle trying to keep up with the pace and maintain a relevance with the waves of younger and livelier participants in the dance.
I was talking to my young granddaughter about her vacation in Maine. I asked her what she liked best and she said she loved it all; the sand, the water, the sun, the amusement park rides, the carnival foods, the ice cream shop. So, I told her the story of how we came to pick that beach; how an old friend, an old engineering friend who was more than thirty years older than me answered a question. I asked him where I could find a nice long beach with white sand that wasn’t horribly crowded, expensive and pretentious like all the New England beaches I had tried. And once we gave his recommendation a try, our kids went there for years while they were growing up and now her mom was doing the same for her.
As I was telling her I could see she didn’t think it was that amazing a story. But I wondered if in twenty or thirty years she might be reminded of this story while she was talking to one of her descendants. Maybe she’d tell her kids about their crazy old great grandfather who told stories about even more ancient people and events and always made sure there was some extra rich ice cream available for dessert and always had time to push a kid on a swing, pick berries or provide a butterfly net for catching lightning bugs.
Yep, summer is reaching its crescendo. A few more parties and outings and then fall and the great seasonal ritual of death. The fall equinox and Halloween and battening down the hatches. I see that Guillermo del Toro has a Frankenstein movie coming out in November. Maybe I’ll give that a try.