Tag: The Honeymooners

Camera Girl Angers the Lightning God

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Many years ago, when Camera Girl was just a simple housewife.  This was before she became a jet-setting companion to a high-powered photographic dynamo; me.  One day while I was at work, I got a call from home.  She informed me that the fire department had to be called because our electric stove had malfunctioned and burst into flames.  The highly professional volunteer firemen had heroically dragged the stove out of the house and it was lying on the driveway like some stricken beast brought low by forces beyond the control of nature.  And she further informed me that the meat loaf was still in it and unless I wanted to try carbonized beef we would need to eat out.  Now, I know for a fact that she’s always disliked electric stoves and ovens.  She claims that only gas stoves provide the kind of temperature control she needs to cook food correctly.  I’m not saying she sabotaged that stove but it is true she was glad to get a new one.  Even if it was also an electric model.

Well yesterday lightning struck again.  At about 4 pm I heard a loud crackle of electricity like something out of the Frankenstein laboratory scene coming from the kitchen followed by Camera girl screaming something incoherently.  I ran into the kitchen to find smoke pouring from the oven.  I shut the power to the oven and turned on the vent fan above the stove.  Then I took the smoke alarm off the wall and put it where it wouldn’t go off.

Sure, enough for the third time in her career as chief cook and bottlewasher in “Chez photog” the heating element in one of her ovens failed.  This time I was there so the fire department wasn’t needed.  I could see the element was cracked and the sound I’d heard was power arcing over the gap.  After gently coaxing Camera Girl off the ceiling fan, I comforted her in her terror and convinced her that all would be well once we got our local appliance store to send a serviceman to install a new element.

But when I called them, it wasn’t as simple as that.  After providing them with the stove’s model number they informed me that they would have to order this critical part.  And when I asked them when they would be able to send someone to install it the pleasant young fellow on the line said, “In three or four weeks.”   I dared not tell Camera Girl that her stove would be out of service for a month so I asked the guy how difficult would it be for me to install it myself.  He thought it would be quite simple and foolproof.  So tomorrow morning I’ll go and pay fifty bucks for this replacement part and spend some part of the day installing it.

Obviously, this is a double-edged sword.  On the up side, I get to save a hundred fifty bucks in service call charges and appear to be a competent and self-sufficient alpha male.  On the down side if I louse up the installation Camera Girl will mock me mercilessly.

Well, there’s nothing to be done about it.  I must rise to the challenge.  I was thinking of watching some episodes of the Honeymooners tonight to see if I can get any pointers from Ralph Kramden’s technique handling Alice’s bouts of sarcasm.  What’s the worst that could happen?  Where did I put that fire extinguisher?

 

He-Man Woman Haters Club or the Royal Order of Raccoons?

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As is my way I’m trying to come up with the name of something before the something even exists.  I’ve become intrigued with the idea of starting a fraternal order that would provide a place for people like me to feel at home.  Both of the names in the title are imaginary societies that appeared in popular tv shows when I was a kid.  The He-Man Woman Haters Club was where the Little Rascals congregated when they were having trouble with Darla or the other girls in the neighborhood and the Racoon Lodge is where Ralph and Ed retreated to when Alice and Trixie were nagging them about the dumpy apartments, they lived in.  Of course, these names may be under copyright protection but any name will do as long as the ground rules are right.

Rule 1 – All voting members will be married men.  They have to be men because women are a nuisance.  They have to be married because wisdom only comes through suffering and no one suffers as much as married men.  Unmarried men are welcome but cannot vote.

Rule 2 – All memberships will be approved by me based on interviews and recommendations of people I can vouch for.  Memberships can be revoked any time someone stops fitting the membership criteria.  I decide the criteria and can change them anytime I deem it necessary.  It’s a flexible system and should prove robust.

Rule 3 – The women’s auxiliary is made up exclusively of wives who can make sandwiches.  They have no standing in the organization other than to assist the members, cheer at sporting events, chaperone children’s activities and make sandwiches (and other designated foodstuffs).  If any wife becomes a nuisance she will be ejected and her husband will be liable for the offense up to and including expulsion.  Girlfriends of unmarried members can join the auxiliary but must get along with the wives.  Any member who has a wife and a girlfriend will have to sort that out himself.

Rule 4 – All children’s activities must be chaperoned by the parents or legal guardians of the children attending.  This is key.  People should care enough to spend time with their kids.  If you don’t want to why would we?

Rule 5 – No member can openly espouse Democrat, progressive, communist, socialist, globalist, anti-American or any other pinko sentiments.  You can be an atheist if you refrain from annoying religious people about it.  The organization is innately pro-God because God has always done right by me.  But we are not denominational.  God only talks to me when I’m alone and won’t allow me to tell anyone else what religion he belongs to.  Sorry.

Rule 6 – Men will wear pants at all times.  This is very important.  We are Americans and American men wear pants.  End of story.  You Scots are out of luck.

Rule 7 – Whenever in the course of a meeting or in organizational documents a pronoun is used for a person of indeterminate sex the masculine form will be used.  If this bothers you then you’re in the wrong club.

Other rules equally idiosyncratic will follow as I get around to making them up.  Suffice it to say that I will provide rules to prevent all the behaviors that annoy me in everyday politically correct arenas.  No make-believe pronouns, no gender equality, no weirdos of any kind (other than my kind of weirdos).

I am openly soliciting a name for this noble fraternal organization.  And if you can think of anything that needs to be added to the rules or if you have other comments, such as, “you must be insane!” then just leave them in the comment section below.

Yours in fraternal benevolence,

photog (AKA, the High, Exalted, Mystic Grand Master General)

 

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Passing the Torch

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The other day I was talking to a young guy at work. Now, by young I’m talking relatively.  Looking at him and basing my opinion on appearance, work experience, the fact that he has a wife and a child, I’d say he’s somewhere between 27 and 32 years old.  Well, we were discussing stuff and Fred Flintstone came up.  We were talking about car tires and how Fred could chisel out a spare when he got a flat.  There were some general comments on the unenlightened character of Fred and I said that Fred was a cartoon copy of the Jackie Gleason character Ralph Kramden and how Ralph was a comical but fair representation of the working class guy of the nineteen fifties.  This elicited blank unrecognition of Jackie Gleason, Ralph Kramden and the Honeymooners in general.  I guess this surprised me.  After all older shows that I watched on TV as a kid were still well known to younger people.  For instance, The Three Stooges were from the 1930s and 1940s and yet they are a fixture on television and are still relatively well-known.  I guessed that the Honeymooners must have disappeared from television far enough back to completely disappear from the present adult population’s collective TV consciousness.  That bothered me.

Why do I think that the Honeymooners shouldn’t disappear? First of all I don’t pretend that the Kramden household represents some golden age portrayal of American marital bliss.  Ralph is portrayed as pretty dimwitted and Alice is given a certain amount of the female empowerment motive that has reached its disgusting fruition in our present feminized society.  She often wins the argument by proving to Ralph just how superior she is and how unfair her role as homemaker is.  Deference to her moral superiority is on display most of the time.  But the basis of the show is the underlying rock-bottom premise that a man should be the king of his castle.  Even in the derisive arguments that Alice gives Ralph at every turn is the bottom line of “so if you’re the boss, what do we do now?”  No matter what dumb thing Kramden does, he is the master of his soul.  He will have to find a way to prevail.  And like it or not, Alice will have to back his play.  And good, bad or indifferent she would rather go along with him than go it alone.  He may be the lowest rung on the totem pole but he is still the alpha male.  And in a few episodes he does get to prove himself the king.  The one that stands out is of course one of the least plausible.  Ralph has obtained a bag full of counterfeit money.  When the gangsters catch up with him they threaten Alice and the neighbors and when Ralph defies them they take him in the back room at gunpoint to work him over and make him comply on giving them the money.  And in this crisis Ralph prevails.  He beats up the thug and rescues his wife and neighbors.  Of course, in the next minute he tries to cash in on his achievement and makes himself ridiculous, but his victory stands as proof that he is the man of the house.  And for once even Alice can’t diminish his victory.

And the other aspect that endears the show to me is the working class ethos. For the most part, American TV exists to reflect the world-view and the sensibilities of the upper middle class.  Even when they are portrayed as struggling twenty-somethings you can see that missing a meal or not having the status symbol item is not part of their existence.  They are the cloud people.  By contrast, the Kramdens and the Nortons (their upstairs friends and neighbors) don’t have two nickels to rub together.  Even buying a new bowling ball can be outside the realm of possibility.  These are people who aspire to be lower middle class.  Ralph dreams up countless get rich quick schemes to allow him to make Alice proud of him.  And he always fails but he never gives up.  That is the kind of message that the young people need to get.  Not that everything will be handed to them on a silver platter.  And not that they can’t decide what is good enough for them.  For that is the message that is out there now.  The government will provide what you need and also decide what you don’t need (or deserve).

So I’m going to do my best to spread the word to the kids about Ralph Kramden and the Honeymooners. I think the show is an antidote for the namby pamby male sterotypes currently infesting television and the movies.  He may be a colossal failure but he certainly is king of his castle.  And that’s a good thing to be.

 

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