Barack Obama: Clean, Articulate and Amoral

I recognized Barack Obama as a lowlife lying scoundrel right before he was inaugurated for his first term. Having contributed to his campaign hoping that having a black president (or even one who was half-black) would end racism  in America, I overlooked then-Senator Joe Biden's smarmy comment about him -- "I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy. I mean, that's a storybook, man."  

I didn't figure Obama for a total fraud until he spent $50,000 of campaign funds on those styrofoam Greek columns flanking him when he made his acceptance speech as the 2008 Democratic nominee. As one pundit wrote at the time, "Nothing says 'out of touch with regular Americans' like Greek columns." (And nothing says "complete fool" like styrofoam ones.)

Now he's served two terms as president with little to show for it, and yet he's just broken ground on his presidential library on the shores of Lake Michigan in Chicago at an expected cost of $850 million. Yes folks, you heard me: 850 large ones. Supposedly the money comes from "private donations" and the library is Obama's way of "giving back" to his hometown, seeing as how it's being erected in the South Shore neighborhood which is predominantly African American.

Yeah, like the thugs who engage in gang wars killing upwards of 20 people each weekend, often including infants and toddlers hit by stray bullets, will drop their weapons and say, "Yo dude, no more fighting. Let's go check out the Obama Library and look at some pictures of him and Michelle and his daughters. Then maybe we can grab lunch somewhere since now we're cool, what with this fabulous building on our turf."

Someone should tell Obama that over 400 black people were murdered in Chicago this year. His presidential library won't stop the killing, but some of that $850 million might if it were spent on improving the lives of the poor in that city and put a dent in the violence instead of inflating his unbelievably huge ego. I wonder how proud of her country Michelle is these days.

No More Hillary

Fool that I am, I recently wasted ten minutes of my allotted time breathing by reading one of those articles they print in the paper to fill the gaping maw left after Trump lost and there stopped being much of interest to report, unless you consider Joe Biden interesting and hardly anyone does. It was in a special section called "Women In the Workplace." 

The writer focused on how to split the housework with your significant other -- actually she used the word husband, implying that most couples are men and women, an outdated conclusion at best -- when you both have full-time jobs. It wasn't about women in the workplace at all, but hey, nobody reads those articles so no big deal.

What caught my attention was a sentence that said "splitting up chores" was important, like "who will take out the trash, who will put in a new roll of paper towels" -- that sort of thing. Were they equating the two things? Here in Maine in winter, taking out the trash requires you to put on a heavy parka and boots and gloves and a hat and maybe even ice cleats, and takes about ten minutes or more depending on the length of your driveway, whereas the paper towel thing ..... well, you get my point.

In fact, who thinks that putting a new roll of paper towels onto the paper towel holder is a chore? Don't you just do it automatically when you use the last paper towel? And if not, why not? If not you then who? Is that beneath you? And if that's a chore, what isn't? Is all of life a chore? What is a chore anyway? "An unpleasant but necessary task," according to one dictionary definition.

At least Hillary Clinton isn't in the news anymore, thank God for that.

FILM REVIEW/ The Iron Lady

Meryl as Margaret, at the doctor's office.

I cannot imagine being a celebrity. Actually I can imagine it and that's why I would never seek fame. Even people who do good and add to the world in a positive way are eventually pilloried and made to look foolish so the rest of us can feel better about ourselves. Take, for example, the film The Iron Lady, about former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. (Please, I beg of you, take it .... far away.)

An oldie released in 2011, the lead role earned a Best Actress Oscar for Meryl Streep. Good for her, but bad for everyone watching.

My interest in the film at this late date arose from seeing The Crown on Netflix, wherein Thatcher is played brilliantly by the actress Gillian Anderson (who won an Emmy last year for her performance) as a tough, strong and formidable leader. I was eager to learn more about Britain's first and only female Prime Minister, who held that office longer than anyone else including Churchill, and who I had all but ignored while she was in office.

In The Iron Lady, we see Thatcher mostly as an old bat in a fat suit, frizzy wig and wrinkly, sagging face makeup, dressed in a baggy nightgown and doddering around her apartment either mumbling or shouting at hallucinations of her dead husband who she thinks is still alive. Streep gives it her all as a pathetic lunatic in the throes of dementia, with lengthy flashbacks to her as a young woman who is not Streep, and a middle-aged woman who is Streep but with obvious fake teeth later used in Bohemian Rhapsody for the fake Freddie Mercury. 

Back and forth, forth and back we go, often from frame to frame. It's hard to keep up, and really quite laughable, if not groan-worthy. To say I hated this movie is silly: I despised it and wanted it to die. But most of all it made me angry that so many people were involved in such a sloppy production intent on showing Great Britain's most influential politician of the 20th century as a blithering, blabbering, blubbering, doddering old lady suffering from a terrible disease. 

The title should have been The Melting of the Iron Lady. Thanks, Hollywood, but I'll stick to Netflix.

Another Cuomo In Trouble

I like this one.

Today's New York Times, once a proud paper respected the world over as the source of important news, devotes a full broadsheet page in their Review section to the childish whining of a woman who wants us all to feel sorry for her because in 2005, which is ALMOST 22 YEARS AGO, Chris Cuomo of CNN fame and the brother of former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, "sexually harassed" her. And despite the fact that one hour later he emailed her a sincere apology for his behavior, still she insists he must "journalistically repent.... We must continue to hold the enablers accountable, both men and women..... It's all got to stop." 

And what was that heinous behavior hinted at in the story's headline, "Chris Cuomo Sexually Harassed Me"? Was it rape? Did he fondle her breasts? De he force his tongue down her throat, or expose his private parts? No, in her own words Cuomo,"walked toward me and greeted me with a strong bear hug while lowering one hand to firmly grab and squeeze the cheek of my buttock." This shocking event took place in public, at an Upper West Side bar at a going-away party for an ABC colleague, where they all worked.

If I had a dime for every time a similar thing happened to me while I was a working woman in the newspaper field, I would buy a Porsche. (See photo)

Beware of LGBTQ (and all the rest)

Recently a friend texted me, "I am embarrassed to be alive." This statement came after he learned of the the ACLU changing the wording of a quote from Ruth Bader Ginsburg, now dead, to eliminate any mention of women and instead turn them into a bunch of "theys" and "theirs." Funny, I thought RBG was a champion of women's rights. But now there are no more women's rights, only crazy gender people's rights.

Why do I have to know that someone is Asexual? Or Queer, or Undecided, Confused, or Messed-Up? How does that help anything? Who cares? How did our society go from gays getting married to the Biden Administration's 2022 fiscal budget replacing the word "mothers" with "birthing people" in a section about public health funding?  

Where will all this madness end? Will there eventually be uterus transplants so that ersatz men created in operating rooms -- think Dr. Frankenstein -- can have babies that will come out of their fake birth canals?

If you have not read George Orwell's "1984" recently, or ever, stop what you are doing and get a copy while you still can and read it through. That's our future.

Another Disease Plagues the Country

Dammit! As if dealing with Covid-19 isn't enough, and just when many of us were finally recovering from years-long severe cases of Trump Derangement Syndrome, a brand new affliction comes along and wallops everyone. Missing White Women Syndrome (MWWS), a highly contagious variant of White Supremacy, is now running rampant across the entire country. 

Fortunately it's mostly contained within the field of journalism, although the intense coverage of missing white women can easily infect Americans from all walks of life, causing them to discuss the particular case in the news with their friends and families even though they've never met the woman who's missing. I admit that I suffer from a bit of MWWS, but I try to tamp it down by avoiding the news. 

Still, I find that my interest in a beautiful 22-year-old white girl who was likely murdered by her 23-year-old boyfriend is of more interest to me than a Native American woman missing since last November. And yesterday's discovery of the body of a young black man who vanished a month ago is a big yawn in compared to last weekend in Chicago when eight black men and one infant were killed, yet nobody cares to know who they were. Their names are not announced, their pictures are not broadcast.

Of course, deaths like that occur every single weekend in Chicago, more or less, and still Joy Reid, Maxine Waters, Don Lemon, Barack Obama, Van Jones and Al Sharpton never bemoan the loss of those people. Heck, I don't even know if they get proper burials or if the city of Chicago just sweeps them up every Monday morning after the violence is over. 

I suppose the condition of being "missing" is more interesting than being "dead." Death is so final, with no follow-up stories. And really, that's where the big money is.

A Yale Education

Most people, when they hear the words "Yale University," think of super-smart people and hallowed halls of learning and ultra-rich elites reading Shakespeare and poring over the works of Socrates and discovering cures for diseases and more like that. But that's not all that happens at Yale University. It is also the site of many independent scientific "studies" conducted by the professors who work there, the results of which will surely benefit all mankind.

I read about one such study this morning in the Wall Street Journal, whose editors found it important enough to devote two-thirds of an entire page of the paper to it. Naturally I want my readers to be up-to-speed on any and all groundbreaking scientific advances, so I will share the findings with you here:

"When women tell jokes at work that fall flat, they are perceived more sympathetically than men are in the same situation."

There were 200 participants in this study conducted by Dr. Taly Reich, an Associate Professor of Marketing at the Yale School of Management, Yale University. And just to be sure of the results -- wouldn't want to get this important stuff wrong -- yet another study was conducted with a different group of participants and found the same result: Women's humor mistakes are less grievous than men's.

That's some of what's going on inside those hallowed halls. In case you wondered.

My Personal Critical Race Theory

If you learn to read and write, escape bad relationships, avoid addictions, stay sober, get a job, take care of your body, are nice to strangers and learn to love yourself, your race won't matter to anyone. Stop blaming failure on the color of your skin.

Prattling Black Woman Syndrome

Joy Reid, that shrew with her own gossip show on MSNBC, has declared that the media's fascination with 22-year-old Gabby Petito is an example of "Missing White Woman Syndrome." The term was coined by another black female journalist, Gwen Ifill, now deceased, during the era of the Chandra Levy, Lacie Peterson and Natalie Hollaway murders. All of those women were also young, pretty and white. Lacking any imagination whatsoever, on her TV show, The Joyless World of Joyless Joy Reid, she whined,“The way this story captivated the nation has many wondering why not the same media attention when people of color go missing."

Hunting down and stirring up bits of evidence of racism wherever she can find it, Reid seems to miss one fact: The public only knows what the media shares with it! One cannot be captivated by something one has never heard about. For example, here in Portland, Maine one of our own young women, Annaliese Heinig, a beautiful blond with movie-star looks, went missing two years ago on Thanskgiving. Although the search for her made the local news for a few weeks, her story did not graduate to the national stage. Her body was recently found, a fact that was quietly noted in some local papers. 

Apparently our Anneliese, a lone suicide, failed to impress the buzzing vultures at CNN, MSNBC, ABC, NBC and all the others who feed on the facts of a particular case and decide which ones will sell the most papers, clicks or advertising. It's got to be sexy! There's a man involved! Was she pregnant? Is it juicy and salacious? If none of those things are present, the case will fizzle into nothing; race has nothing to do with it.

Reid, and the long-gone Ifill, are just two examples of how the media feeds the racism story to further their own careers. In Ifill's case she did some fine work and won many awards. With Joyless Reid, however, it's gonna take a lot more than complaining about white people to get respect since she lacks any shred of talent and is ugly to boot. What she does have is a lot of wigs which she changes constantly, so if you're looking for hairstyle ideas you might want to tune in to her show.

TV Review: TED LASSO

Ted, center, surrounded by his colleagues.

Now in its second season on Apple TV+, Ted Lasso is the best escape entertainment right now, ever since The Kominsky Method ended. (And The Sopranos and The Crown, of course, both of which barely need mentioning since everyone already knows, and which are still available to see thanks to modern technology).

Even though he is a fictional TV character, Ted is my new role model. If we were all like him, the world be a better place. Jason Sudeikis, the actor who plays Ted, just won the Emmy for Best Actor in a Comedy Series. He is definitely great, but the show's writers, whose names I don't know and who may or may not have also won awards, are the responsible parties. They conjured up someone who likely does not and could not exist: an all-loving, all-forgiving man with a great sense of humor who bakes fabulous cookies for his friends and dispenses wisdom to fit any occasion. He's sort of a cross between Socrates, the Pope and Robin Williams.

On the down side, Ted's an anxiety-ridden mess given to panic attacks who consistently ignores his inner demons. (God knows how since he doesn't use drugs and only has the occasional beer or two.) He comes from someplace in Kentucky and speaks with an accent that's difficult to understand much of the time.  (Here's where that super technology comes in; we often stop and rewind two or three times to catch the dialog.) And Ted's constant stream of inside jokes referring to old TV shows and movies can be off-putting to young viewers, and sometimes even older ones. Then there's the fact that after his divorce he took a job as a soccer coach in London, an ocean away from his young son who he now sees only on Zoom calls. Bad idea.

Still, he's fair-minded and wise and cares about everyone, all good traits to have. Best of all, his supporting cast is fabulous too. I wish I could have them all over for dinner.

Getting Rid of Yourself

Getting rid of a body -- be it your own or someone else's -- is almost always a costly affair, unless you are in the Mafia. Cremation is about $2,500, and a traditional burial can run to $10,000 depending on the quality of the casket and how fancy the lunch is afterwards. 

A brand new idea is "body composting," which is exactly what it sounds like and is also not cheap. (One could say it costs an arm and a leg but really it's all four limbs and the head and torso too.) A company in Colorado, one of only two states where the process of rotting a dead person is legal (the other is Oregon), charges $7,900 per corpse, so a lot more than just those veggies and egg shells rotting in your compost bin. 

This is very unfair to poor people who can barely afford to keep themselves alive, let alone take care of their dead, and it's probably just a matter of time before the Democrats start offering free burials to those in need. I say if you're strapped for cash, just load some big rocks in your jacket pocket like Virginia Woolf did and go for a swim. 

The Gift That Keeps on Giving (to Bob Woodward)

Bob Woodward, asshole extraordinaire, spent quite a few years twiddling his thumbs after his early fame as a young Washington Post reporter who struck gold with the Watergate scandal. Since then -- what to do, what to do? Popping up here and there as an occasional columnist and guest on TV talk shows, he was no longer a superstar, just an aging, liberal finger-pointer exploiting the Republican faux-pas du jour. 

Then Trump was elected and Woodward hit the jackpot. Since then he's written three tell-all books detailing what he considers the various sins of the former president. His book's titles say it all: Fear, then Rage, and now Peril. Since its debut in 2018, Fear has sold 3 million copies. Rage sold 600,000 copies in its first week of publication. I guess people enjoy reading slanted muckraking about politicians they hate.

Are we to believe that Woodward's motivation for writing these books is to warn Americans about an evil in our midst, not really caring how much money he's raking in? Apparently out of revelations, his latest book was written with a partner (Robert Costa) who hopefully brought along some fresh insults.

But what a waste of eyesight! If you want to read something truly great that will actually benefit you instead of depress you, opt for The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. First published in 1925, it has continued to sell 500,000 copies annually despite the fact that Trump is not mentioned. I have read it many times and it's always a treat. Here are the first two sentences, which I think of often:

"In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since. Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone, he told me, just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had."

Introduction to Grandparents: A Crash Course

I don't have grandchildren. I suppose if I did I would love them unconditionally, as I do my son. I might even think they are "the most adorable" children that ever were born. I'm pretty sure my husband and I would dote on them. And I am absolutely certain I would never, ever, tell my friends and colleagues and the checkout lady at the supermarket anything about them. 

Drooling in public over their grandchildren's photos, videos and cute things they say is commonplace among the elderly and it makes me cringe. Really, I don't know how to react, especially when the kid in question isn't really cute at all, or the video is inane, and the allegedly clever things they say are just what every kid says at that age. Then what? How should I react? Should I fake a laugh at the non-funny quip from a 2-year-old that my friend thinks is a sign of genius? I'm at a loss.

I recently took a leap of faith and told my very best friend that I no longer want to hear the "cute" things her grandson says, especially with her mimicking his baby voice, and that while I love her and am glad she's happy, she needn't share/bore me with it any more, pretty please. It did not go over well. Now she's mad at me and says she won't tell me anything personal about anything anymore.

So I guess we all have to shut up and grin and bear it. Or at least shut up and bear it.

Simpletons

CNN's simpleton Anderson Cooper.

In folklore, a simpleton is a person whose foolish actions are the subject of often-repeated stories. (See photo.) Folklore often holds, with no basis in fact, that certain towns or countries are thought to be home to large numbers of simpletons.

Based on the above definition of the word, which I found on Wikipedia, most simpletons here in America can be found in the so-called "blue" states. This explains why most if not all Democrats believe that the overwhelming  problems we face as a nation are the fault of  "Trumpies," or Donald Trump himself.

One example is my friend who explained that the gang murders occurring in Chicago every weekend are "all because of Trump."

"How so?" I asked. 

The answer: "Because all the Trumpies have guns and they refuse to enact gun laws."

Yesterday another friend blamed the recent rise in Covid cases here in Maine on "Republican anti-vaxxers," overlooking the huge percentage of African-Americans who continue to refuse to be vaccinated.

While I am not a "Trumpie" I preferred him to Joe Biden and so voted for him in the last election. I have quite a few friends who also voted Republican; none of them have guns and all of them have been vaccinated.

Don't be a simpleton: Think for yourself. Weigh the evidence. Look at the facts. Turn off CNN.

Exploiting 9/11

Yesterday's New York Times went all out to exploit the horror of 9/11, filling many column inches reliving that day. Several of their uber-liberal columnists used it as fodder for nonsense, one of them linking the falling of the Twin Towers to making America's men more macho and another blaming that event for the storming of the Capitol last January. But what really irked me was all the whining in the Letters to the Editor grouped under the heading, "Readers offer their 9/11/ memories."

One woman who escaped unscathed wrote that, "20 years later the tears still come unexpectedly and the smell of jet fuel lingers." Another, who was in a hotel near the Pentagon, fretted that "the death-laden odor will always remain nested in my brain." A third, the wife of a funeral director, tells of her husband's "white and pasty" face after he buried one of the victims, saying, "I'd never seen him like that." (Apparently all the other dead people he had embalmed during his entire career never bothered him.)

Someone one else who saw the event on TV related a recurring dream he had at the time (and still has occasionally) about riding on a New York City commuter train seated next to a skeleton "wearing a suit and tie. I realized he was a ghost of 9/11." A woman 3,000 miles away in California, "was haunted by visions of the surrounding building pancaking" for months after. Perhaps the most offensive letter was from a man booked on one of the flights that crashed into the towers who decided he wanted to sleep a little later and so changed his flight the night before, saying, "My travel agent saved my life!"

Naturally there were no letters from any of the children whose parents never came home again, or those poor souls who suffered third degree burns on their faces and bodies, undergoing multiple skin graft surgeries for years, or were permanently crippled or disfigured, or went insane from grief and pain, and certainly none from all the suicides who jumped to escape a burning office, their bodies splattering on the pavement so many floors below. Now those would have made for interesting, compelling and heart-wrenching reading.

Putting 9/11 in Perspective

9/11 Memorial in Manhattan

Here we go again. It's 9/11 season and lest we forget, lots of people are busy making sure we don't. The reading of the names, the memorial services, the airing of the historic footage, the candlelight vigils, the platitudinous speeches, the special photo essays in newspapers and magazines, the brief moments of silence: we've been there, done that. But this is the 20th Anniversary so who knows, there might be more. Confetti? Noisemakers? A giant cake perhaps?

No, I am not making light of the terrible thing that happened on that day in 2001. I was living in Washington, D.C. at the time, had just dropped my 14-year-old son off at school and was happily expecting the arrival of a friend from California when I got the news and everything changed. Life went dark. The friend couldn't come, my son was stuck at school, and the beautiful towers I loved so dearly in the city of my birth fell. The country sobbed in unison. I made a pilgrimage to the hole in the ground a few weeks later and cried some more.

But -- we don't read the names of all the young soldiers we lost in Vietnam. We don't still honor those killed in all the other wars, military plane crashes and worst of all, from friendly fire. Why do we still do this? Why are those people who went to work or boarded an airplane and died that day (with the obvious exception of the fearless firefighters who gave their lives in service to others) considered heroes?

Let's move on. We now have bigger fish to fry, like Joe Biden thinking he is The King of America. "I have the power," he said repeatedly in a speech to the nation yesterday regarding his Covid vaccine mandates. What he didn't say but was probably thinking was, "If only I could remember where I put it."

"Cancel Culture" Cancels Culture

Young people today are even more sheeplike than their elders, not unlike Hitler's willing executioners who gassed millions of people because they were told to do so. The same robotic mindset can be found among today's youth, from so-called Millennials on down, who blindly follow the questionable orders of those "influencers" they follow on TikTok, YouTube and Facebook.

Being in close connection with many of that generation, I hear stories of cancellation that make my blood run cold. Entire reputations, businesses and relationships are destroyed in an instant based on hearsay, innuendo and rumor, much of it unfounded in reality. It's scary to think that someday these people will actually rule the upper echelons of everything, most of which is now still run by fuddy-duddies like Biden, Pelosi and the white-haired captains of industry.

According to Cancel Culture, you can't learn anything from anyone unless you share their blood. You can't cook like an Indian unless you were baptized in the Ganges. You can't eat chitlins unless your great-granny was a slave. You can't wear your hair in braids unless your DNA contains strands of Native American. In fact, the only people who can do anything at all are the direct descendants of whoever first did whatever it is you want to do. Which means no more WASPs saying things like "Who knew?" and "Oy!" And surely no blueberry-cinnamon bagels which were not in evidence in the Jewish communities of Poland.

Absent cross-pollination, Cancel Culture heralds the end of all culture in America. Soon enough, what was once an enticing melting pot will just be a not-so-fine kettle of fish.

Reality Bites

Everyone will eventually die. This is a fact that we all learn sometime during childhood, before it is swept under the rug as something that only happens to old people ( which we all know is a crock) so why speak about it, accept it, plan for it, or even think about it? Consequently when it happens to someone we love we are shocked, angry and overcome with grief and sadness, despite its being a natural part of life. Oddly, the only deaths we applaud are those of unborn children on their journey to birth; that is seen as a great advancement of our culture. 

Instead we read about movie stars who are actually having their babies and politicians who are sexual predators or tax evaders, or all the people who were friends of Jeffrey Epstein, which is what the Internet loves most. Couldn't there be at least one teeny, weeny website devoted to How to Die, or The Truth About Dying, or Getting Ready for the Great Beyond, or something? 

Do we really have to read about 14-year-old "influencers" posting pictures of themselves online in bikinis, like that has any value to society at all? I mean, one iota of value, besides priming a new generation of sexual perverts and predators? 

I have no answers to this big, fat failure of ours. But there are books out there on the subject and I suggest everyone read one or two before it's their turn to pass away. Another source for reflection is cartoons, for which death is a great subject. Thank all the cartoonists out there who dare to broach this important topic.

Educated Women Getting Dumber

Yesterday I read in the Wall Street Journal about a woman named Jennifer Cruz, a Manhattan special education teacher with a master's degree so we can assume she's fairly bright, who was not in a relationship at the age of 29 yet wanted a child. So naturally, this being Crazy Times, Jen went to a sperm bank and got herself impregnated and nine months later had a baby. So what if the kid's father was a test tube -- she was a mother!

A few years later Jen married a real live man and is now 36 and pregnant again. Happy days? But no --  that marriage is now ending. So by the age of 37 this unwed mother will have two children: one with no father at all and the other with an absentee father who hopefully will visit periodically and fork over some child support.

The headline of the article is, "Educated Women Having More Babies Outside of Marriage." Its seminal point is that according to a study by a Johns Hopkins University sociologist, the sharpest rise in fatherless families is now among women holding a bachelor's degree or more. I don't even want to think about what uneducated women are doing.

The Unfair Common Ground Fair

Here in Maine there is a much-touted annual September event called The Common Ground Fair. At heart it is a typical county fair, but with a "cause," that being the celebration of sustainability, veganism, composting, recycling, sheep-shearing, yarn-spinning, non-GMOism, gluten freedom and all those other woke things that separate the holier-than-thou younger generation from its elders, who in their minds still toss empty Burger King wrappers out of car windows and strangle all the dolphins in the ocean with littered plastic rings from six-packs of Budweiser. 

Anyway, when we moved here 12 years ago we heard repeatedly that we MUST go to the Common Ground Fair if we were any kind of decent people. So we made the hour-plus drive, parked in the giant parking lot almost a mile from the fairgrounds, had a lovely walk through the woods to get there and it turned out to be a big yawn. We visited all the different tents, saw some people on stilts performing for the kiddies, bought some baskets and organic applesauce and a couple of pumpkins, watched a few sheep getting sheared and knives getting sharpened and baskets being made, saw milk turn into butter, heard all about how 9/11 was an inside job and drove home, content to never return.

Then our son became one of the presenters at Common Ground, so we went back to support his efforts, teaching how to make various types of baskets from natural materials, and moccasins from deer hide, and more like that. His friends and mentors were there too, sharing their knowledge of living off the grid and on the land, armed with little but the sweat of their brow and some elbow grease. It was all pretty inspiring and very impressive. Those particular classes were what separated this fair from most of the others where what you do is eat pizza, corn on the cob, fried clams, hot dogs, French fries and cotton candy, buy arts and crafts, go on kiddie rides and win giant stuffed animals by throwing coins at empty Coke bottles.

Alas, this year the producers of the Fair known as MOFGA (Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners), voted to ban and eliminate all the presenters who were sharing knowledge learned from reading about  Maine's original inhabitants, the Wabanaki tribe. Apparently these hateful and privileged white people, while incredibly resourceful, weren't teaching, they were stealing the old traditions from the Wabanaki and thus had to be stopped! It was time for Maine to WOKE UP! Essentially any reason to go to Common Ground Fair was eliminated. 

Oh well, like last year the Fair has been cancelled for 2021 due to the recent surge in COVID cases. Maybe by next year the pandemic will be over and the Woke Movement will have been mercifully put to sleep, allowing all those really interesting presenters to return. We can only hope.

Pete Buttigieg, Mommy Dearest?

Recovering from labor? Or was it a C-section?

Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg and his husband just added two puppies, I mean babies to their "family." Okay fine, they want to be parents -- I get it. Adopted children are lucky someone wants them. My issue is with the photo the men released which is now plastered all over the Internet and in every newspaper (and on this blog), showing the two of them next to each other lying IN A HOSPITAL BED, holding the infants. They are even even wearing hospital wristbands they put on patients! 

This is sick and twisted. Are we supposed to think that one of them gave birth? Or maybe both of them? Sorry guys, but childbirth needs a uterus and that's that.

Coming Out

I just read an article online about a mid-level TV actress who finally "came out" as being pansexual. Like we care. Like it matters to anyone who watches "Schitt's Creek" that the woman playing the secondary character named Stevie enjoys having sex with all people of any gender. She said she "feels better" now that it's out.

That got me thinking. Maybe it does matter, since everyone seems to be coming out these days. And hey, I'll do anything to feel better. So I will say right here and now that I am a heterosexual. It's true, I only like to have sex with men. I know that sounds crazy, especially in this day and age when there are so many different genders from which to choose, but there it is. I can't help myself. It's simply who I am.

I hope my readers can accept that.

Don't Be Fooled by September

Yesterday being the first of September I made the mistake of going outside to do some yard work, something I rarely do in summer, and when I do I make sure to apply bug spray and wear gloves and a hat and long sleeves and long pants tucked into boots. Yes, wearing that all makes me very hot, but the alternative is worse. 

So anyway, seeing as how the calendar said SEPTEMBER I ventured outside not in my usual full anti-bug regalia and spent about half an hour cleaning up the garden, time enough for me to become an All-You-Can-Eat bar for the mosquitos, Satan's flying henchmen, who, somehow knowing their end is near, stuffed themselves silly.

As a consequence, last night sleeping was out of the question as all the bites made me puff up like the Pillsbury Doughboy. Instead I spent the night itching and scratching and applying creams and lotions and cool compresses, none of which worked, all the while cursing my stupidity. How could I have been fooled that way by a simple word on a calendar?

Soon enough it will be OCTOBER, which is the real deal, with cool days and cold nights and bright orange leaves crunching underfoot. And no bugs. Then I'll go outside again. 

President Windbag

"A person who talks at length but says little of value." That's the definition of a windbag. And President Joe Biden, little more than an empty wrinkled suit ready for the Goodwill pile, is the personification of the word. 

Yesterday he addressed the nation on the topic of America's messy military withdrawal from Afghanistan, replacing truth with his scriptwriter's pie-in-the-sky rendition. Most of it was pure hogwash, making all the death and destruction seen in Kabul over the last few weeks seem like a playground dustup. Nobody, not even the most hard-core liberal, could possibly have believed a word of it.

Basically, we're on our own.