Dogs and Cats Are Nicer

Just in case you forgot, or are in denial, everyone gets old unless they die young. Got it? Yet members of the media, and people in general, are obsessed with showing photos of aging celebrities and gnashing their teeth over how "old" they look. 

The oddest part of this unpleasant trend is that when an old celebrity opts for plastic surgery to try and stay young-looking, those same members of the media and the general public mock them for doing so.

Humans are so mean-spirited. No wonder so many of us have pets.

Breaking News

When I was growing up, the words "breaking news" meant something big had happened. Some examples were: 

"JFK Assassinated" 

"Bobby Kennedy Assassinated" 

"MLK Jr. Assassinated" 

"Anwar Sadat Assassinated" 

"Indira Gandhi Assassinated" 

"Elvis Presley Drafted"

"John Lennon Killed"

"First Man Lands on the Moon"

"War Breaks Out in Israel"

Today those words are bandied about liberally, and when you click on the story it might be:

"Lisa Rinna Has More Lip Injections"

BIG LIPS GET BIGGER!

"Kim Kardashian Reveals What She Has for Breakfast"

"Goldie Hawn Tells Why She Won't Marry Kurt Russell"

"Kevin Spacey Cries in Court"

"White House Gets New Dog"

"Barbie Beats Out Oppenheimer at Box Office"

"New York City Faces Heat Wave"

"Elon Musk Likes Anchovy Pizza"

"Doctors Advise Drinking Water to Avoid Dehydration Symptoms"

How times have changed.

The Luck of the Draw

This morning I went for a routine blood test to satisfy the requirements for a new volunteer position at a local hospital. By the time you're my age, having blood drawn is certainly not worth worrying about. But still, over the years the outcomes of this minor procedure have varied. Best case scenario: I can barely see where the needle was inserted in my arm. But today, once I got home and removed the bandaid the nurse had applied, I found an angry purple bulge the size of a Greek olive -- one of those big ones.

A few hours have passed and it now looks like a flattened Greek olive, still purple and angry. I assume in time it will dissipate, and I'm not an arm model so no biggie, yet I had to wonder why it was there at all. Did I drink too much coffee at breakfast? Was I dehydrated? Or was the nurse, a lovely young woman I enjoyed talking with, simply lousy at drawing blood? Unless it gets worse, I'll write it off as bad luck.

This relatively common experience got me thinking about how often "the luck of the draw" impacts our lives, and I'm not just talking about the Powerball. Two perfect people come together to conceive a child, and the wrong sperm reaches the egg to produce a terribly damaged fetus, which matures into a person saddled with lifelong deficiencies and disabilities. Or maybe the sperm was fine but the egg was damaged, no matter. The point is, lives are changed in an instant by circumstances far beyond our control.

When I was eight years old I was enrolled in the first national tests of a trial polio vaccine. Kids my age across the country were given injections of the newly-minted Salk vaccine in a controlled blind experiment. Half of us got the drug, the other half got water. I got the good stuff.

Twenty-five years later I met Sue, a wheelchair-bound colleague at a newspaper where I worked. She was exactly my age and had also been part of the Salk experiment, but she got the placebo. And then she got polio.

You can try as hard as you can to do the right thing, be in the right place at the right time and eat all your vegetables, but in the end, much of life is determined by the luck of the draw.

The Call is Coming from Inside the House

The current administration would have us believe the biggest threat to our nation is Donald Trump. Yet the sitting (sometimes falling down) president is a proven liar, lifelong plagiarist and suspected thief who allegedly accepted millions of dollars for peddling political favors to foreign nationals while serving as Vice President under Obama. Oblivious to the facts, stubborn Democrats stick by Biden despite his overwhelming ethical, mental and moral deficiencies.

Prostitutes are now called "sex workers," like that's a respectable job. In a grand gesture of appreciation for all that they do, New York's Democratic Governor Hochul is endorsing a bill to give those people unlimited access to health care. As reported today in the New York Post, "The state Health Department has awarded $1 million in public funds combined over two years to two contractors as part of the new 'sex worker health pilot program.' Under the initiative, sex workers in New York City and western New York will be provided with primary, sexual and behavioral health care, as well as dental care."

The Biden's Justice Department is suing the Governor of Texas for trying to keep illegal immigrants from swimming across the Rio Grande and entering his state, thereby  endangering the lives of all Americans and the immigrants themselves.

Meanwhile, Barbie, a movie about a doll, has broken box office records, topping $2 million in its opening weekend.

Maine's Brain Drain

Life is hard everywhere, but it's even harder in Maine. People here are very unfriendly and seem quite content to be so. Might it be caused by the cold winters, or maybe some toxic chemicals in all those flannel shirts imported from China? Whatever the cause, it's palpable.

Born and raised in New York, I find it easy to talk to strangers. I'm almost never at a loss for words, except maybe at a funeral service where it's best to say as little as possible. But other than that, I say hello to people I know and don't know on the street, or in the grocery store, or especially inside the lobby of our  local post office, which is like a 10 x 10 foot space, so it's hard not to.

Today I went to get the mail and was the only person in there until a man entered and looked directly at me. A colleague of my husband, I had been to his home twice and had him over for dinner at my home, along with some weird woman he was dating. Naturally I smiled and said, "Hi." He said nothing and instead went to his mailbox. Had he gone deaf, I wondered?

Unlikely, since it wasn't the first time "Amos" (his real name) dissed me at the post office. It was the third time, but this time it pissed me off and put me in a sour mood. Fortunately I was on my way to acupuncture so my mood was quickly dispelled, but I want to make the point here that dissing people you know, especially when they have cooked you a meal, sucks and is to be avoided. 

Lest you think this affliction applies only to Amos, the very same thing happened frequently with the brother of an old friend, who I shall call "Bobby Moore," who I met a dozen times and had dinner with on several occasions. Each time we would meet anew he introduced himself to me with a handshake, except when I saw him in the grocery store where he would stare blankly and say nothing. 

I wonder, do the cold winters kill off brain cells?

Sorority Barbies Break the Bank

If you need further proof of the typical American's intellectual deterioration beyond Kamala Harris being our sitting Vice President, consider this: Today's parents of college-age children spend many thousands of dollars on consultants to help their pampered, perpetually immature daughters secure a spot in a sorority. 

For a steep fee they receive advice on clothing, makeup and conversation style: what to say and how to say it, how to act in social situations, and what topics to avoid.

We are not talking chump change: The Georgia-based consulting firm, It's All Greek to Me, "offers a $600 seminar for women and their mothers to learn the basics about getting into a sorority." An additional  $3,500 "buys unlimited access to sorority members who advise aspirants through every step." One such service in Texas, called Hiking in High Heels, has fees that run as high as $4,000 for on-call services during Rush Week.

There's further reporting of this nauseating trend in today's Wall Street Journal, if you can stomach it. I found it to be even more disturbing than the front-page news concerning troubles in Israel and the war in Ukraine. At least in those situations, important ideals are being challenged and fought for or against. But being in a sorority is little more than a bunch of grown-up Barbies seeking a group of friends to feel less alone on the playground. Is that really worth so much of their parents' hard-earned cash?

These would-be sorority sisters are in for a big shock upon graduation from their padded cocoons: The truth is, we are all alone, a fact to be accepted sooner rather than later, like, say, on your deathbed. 

I finally understood it during childbirth. My husband stayed by my side the whole time, except when he left for a smoke or to get a snack or a cup of coffee, or to phone in to his job or maybe sit in the sun for awhile. (It was November, but unseasonably warm in Washington, DC that year.) I couldn't really blame him -- 23 hours of labor is surely a drag, but really it was mostly a drag just for me. 

Don't children ever become adults anymore?

Remembering the Dead

I was with my grandfather on his last day on earth, July 3, 1969. It was just the two of us there in his bedroom; everyone else had gone to a family wedding. The last thing he said to me, after gifting me with a huge sack of change as "the only thing he had to leave me" and a story about how he had always found money on the street and saved it all, was that from then on, whenever I found a coin on the street it was him saying hello from Heaven. A few minutes later, he died.

So now when I find a penny, or a dime or a nickel or a quarter lying on the ground, I look up and say "Hi" right back to him. It happens quite often -- more than to most people. Naturally my grandfather is never far from my thoughts and it's been 54 years.

One year ago today my closest friend died, crossing paths with a speeding Freightliner at exactly the wrong moment. Debra was an avid birder who trapped hawks and other large avian species for scientific research purposes. She recognized every bird and was in awe of each and every one she saw overhead.

So now every time I see a bird in the sky -- or a speeding Freightliner -- I think of Deb. As you can imagine, she is never far from my thoughts.

The moral of the story: If you want your spirit to live on after your death, do something distinctly memorable. 

When Billy Shot Sis

I was eight years old when Sis, my 14-year-old babysittter who lived next door, was shot dead in the garage by her older brother Billy. 

Right before it happened I was sprawled out on the living room floor in my flannel PJs, reading the Sunday funnies that came with our newspaper. Lying next to me, napping, was our boxer, Caesar. My parents were a few yards away, having breakfast in the kitchen. 

A shot rang out. It was very loud, as our house was a tiny little thing and the walls were thin. Naturally the dog woke up and went crazy, running around in circles and barking.

My father ran out to investigate and returned moments later with a strange expression on his face. My mother asked what happened. "We're gonna need a new sitter," was his reply. 

Supposedly Billy had been cleaning his rifle but who knows -- the two of them fought a lot. And why did a 16-year-old own a rifle? We lived in the suburbs, 35 minutes outside of Manhattan, not exactly hunting territory.

Anyway, that's when and where I got my fear of guns and wry wit.

Fair is Fair

Since Disney is remaking the classic story of Snow White into Snow Brown, I wondered if anyone is working on updating the following stories to reflect the forgotten white American:

White Like Me

White Beauty

White Boy

The Story of Little White Sambo

The White Stallion

The White Girl in Search of God

Snow Person of Color and the Seven Individuals of Average Height

Face it: Things are bad and will be getting steadily worse. Coming to a theater near you in March of 2024 -- the updated, politically correct, don't-offend-anyone-even-though-everyone-is-so-offensive Disney remake of an old classic intended to undo all the damage done to you as a child when you saw the original!

In the new version, Snow White (seen at left prior to her skin-darkening procedure) is Latina and she lives with seven people of average height. (No word yet about their  pronouns.)

As I write this, scientists at the North Pole are hard at work trying to change the color of snow.

Confessions of A Fragile White Person

I am sick of race. Sick of hearing about it, reading about it and talking about it. As far as I'm concerned it's a made-up issue exacerbated and promoted by wicked Democrats to garner votes. But guess what? It turns out that feeling this way is an example of my "white fragility," a term concocted by an academic with "experience in diversity training" who wrote a book about the so-called condition.

It means, according to this white writer whose name I shall not utter, "any defensive instincts or reactions that a white person experiences when questioned about race or made to consider their own race." 

As an example, recently a stranger on Facebook said my blog post about the inanity of "people of color" being acceptable language but saying "colored people" indicates you are a racist was an example of my white fragility. Of course I Googled the term immediately and I plead not guilty. 

Go ahead, ask me about being white -- I won't flinch. But I do admit to other sorts of fragility. The following subjects give me the willies: Morbid obesity, serial murderers, the cost of a day pass at Disney World, transgenderism, cancer in children and physical deformities of any kind (i.e. transgenders). 

Just this morning I shoved almost a whole box of fresh strawberries -- the expensive kind my husband bought at a local farmer's market -- down the garbage disposal because they were all oddly misshapen. Some were downright freakish.

So I guess I am guilty of fragility, just not the white kind.

Ignorance Pays Off in More Than Bliss

      Herman Grim, never hired after failing the test three times, got $2,055,383.00.

Once again, New York City is making news: 

"It's the largest legal payout in city history. As of Friday, 225 people who failed the Liberal Arts and Sciences Test used for teacher licensing from 1994 to 2014 had already been notified they're getting settlements of at least $1 million, according to an analysis of Manhattan federal court records."

"The lawsuit, originally filed by four teachers in 1996, claimed that the exam was "culturally biased" in favor of white applicants. According to the plaintiffs, more than 90% of white applicants passed the multiple-choice and essay test while black applicants only passed 53% of the time. Hispanic applicants only received passing scores 50% of the time."

I'm basically speechless and can add nothing since whatever I say will be seen as racist and evidence ofwhite-supremacist thinking. All I know is that one of the questions was who was Andy Warhol. (I sure would like to see that test.)

To Be Human Is To Complain

Where I live, in southern Maine, it's been raining a lot. Like every day, for weeks. And weeks. It's simply raining too much. And the rain is making it very muggy and humid. It's also too buggy. Too many mosquitoes. Too many biting flies and brown-tail moths, which are the worst if you ask me. It's very unpleasant to be outside. Most people are complaining about it, especially boaters who have been denied their weekends on the water all summer long thus far.

I know that in some parts of the country they have it even worse. Like out west where it's too hot, breaking records hot. Not raining, but too sunny. Those folks are doing a lot of complaining too. So that's a lot of complaining, from coast to coast. 

But to be honest, complaining is pretty much what humans do, no matter what, and it's a bummer. You rarely meet people who say, "Praise the Lord, thank you God for letting me wake up today, to another glorious day on earth." In fact, I have never heard anyone say that except maybe in a church sermon in a movie or in a book, since I don't actually go to church.

I try to make myself stop complaining, but it's hard when you itch literally from head to toe, which I have been doing since early June. Still, I am aware that summer will end and the heat will be a distant memory, if I live that long. And I don't mean that in a morbid way, just in an accurate way, since one never knows. 

A year ago today my friend Debra was alive and well, and six days later she was killed in a car crash. I can't remember if she was complaining about anything the last time we spoke, which was the night before she died, possibly a little about how hard she had been working for weeks, preparing for her family's annual two-week camping trip in the Tetons, cooking and freezing enough breakfasts, lunches and dinners for nine people for 14 days, which ironically ended up scattered on a highway in Wyoming.

I'm not complaining about her death, which was horrible and still is, every day, I'm just trying to impress upon myself and anyone reading this that perhaps too much rain isn't so bad and we just should accept it, even though everything carefully and lovingly planted in the vegetable garden and flower beds in May is now turning to mush.

The itching sucks, though. Like right now I just got a new bite on my ankle, sitting here inside my house, and it's driving me crazy. Itching is completely unacceptable and I shall keep complaining about it until October.

Silly Semantics

Eli Crane, Republican representative from Arizona speaking in front of Congress, said "colored people" instead of "people of color" and now virtue signalers have their panties in a knot and are demanding his offensive, racist slur be stricken from the record!

What's the big deal? What is the difference? Has anyone ever heard of the NAACP? Doesn't everyone know those letters stand for National Association for the Advancement of Colored People? 

Since there can't be any of them anymore, I guess the NAACP helps nobody. They better change their name to NAAPOC.

A Hole in the Cloud

Oh Jesus, as if we all don't have enough to worry about already, I read today that "a fundamental gap" in Microsoft's cloud has allowed Chinese cyberspies to hack into "an unspecified number of unclassified email accounts." Mine is definitely unclassified so it could be one of them. This can't be good.

Now the Chinese will find out that I hate Chinese food, which I wrote in an email to a friend not long ago when she suggested we meet for dinner at Wun Hung Lo. I went into some detail about how it's basically all corn starch and cat guts, very salty and grossly unhealthy, and that sugary fried chicken dish they call General Tso's that's on every Chinese menu in America is truly revolting. Also the fortune cookies are moronic and not fortunes at all, but more like sayings. 

So I guess I can expect a midnight raid at my home any time now, when I'll get taken away to some forced labor camp somewhere. I just hope it's in this country because after that 12-hour flight to Israel, I simply cannot tolerate another long flight, and Portland to anywhere in China is at least 24 hours and then some. And just my luck, they'll serve Chinese food on the flight.

Finding Joy Online

I finally understand why the Internet is so popular. And by popular I mean that all living, breathing, functioning persons past the age of about ten spend all their free time there. It's because it allows us to blot out the reality of our own lives (and inevitable death) with videos of cats, dogs, cats snuggling with dogs, cats nuzzling baby chicks, dogs chasing grown chickens and people cooking dead chickens in crock pots with canned mushroom soup and shredded cheddar cheese, and read essays by other people to see what we should be doing instead.  

What clarified this for me was an article online about a 44-year-old surfer in Hawaii who suffered a fatal wound from a shark's fin to the groin. It focused on the surfer's heartbroken daughter who posted her grief online, writing, "I wish this had never happened" and "I wish I could have given you one last hug." Her Instagram numbers soared.

So many thoughts flooded my mind. Like whenever someone I love dies I also wish it hadn't happened. And when my death comes I'm sure I would wish it wouldn't have, if dead people could still wish. But reading about this surfer's untimely death made me grateful to be alive, although not being a surfer myself and  never swimming with sharks, it didn't hit me too hard.

Just like how stories of Hunter Biden, a bigger asshole than most of us, and his whole shady deals-drugs-prostitutes-bribery-daughter-out-of-wedlock grab our attention and hold on like a pit bull with a toddler. Now we learn that SCOTUS member Sonya Sotomayor is also no angel, hawking her children's books to the tune of $3 million, give or take. What's worse, she makes her staff do the hawking and the taxpayers foot the bill. 

Compared to what I read online, my life is joyous and to be celebrated. I'm still alive, with no wounds to my groin, and honest to a fault. I'm a saint, really. So today is a good day. See, I feel better already, and all I had to do was turn on my computer.

Mr. Miss Netherlands

The 2023 winner of the title of Miss Netherlands in the Miss Universe pageant is a man. Well, he is actually a transgender doing his best to look like a woman but with a penis, a common appendage only seen in men.

The pageant, once owned by Donald J. Trump, is now owned by a transgender. So I guess from now on all the winners will be biological males. This should really confuse Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson.

Diversity, Why?

Diversity is all the rage these days. And since the Supreme Court struck down Affirmative Action weeks ago, it's literally causing rage amid some sectors of the population. The opinion section of today's New York Times is devoted to the subject, shouting on its front page, "THE SUPREME COURT BANNED AFFIRMATIVE ACTION IN HIGHER EDUCATION. BUT THAT DOESN'T MEAN THAT AMERICA HAS TO GIVE UP ON DIVERSITY: HOW TO FIX COLLEGE ADMISSIONS NOW" is the full title, as if they are broken and need repair.

When did they break? They were perfectly fine when I attended New York University in the 60s, with students of all races and ethnicities in all of my classes. We didn't think of our school as diverse, we thought of it as normal. Nobody cared who was what. Still, I can't recall how anyone "of color" enriched my learning experience. I went to class, studied  hard and did the work that was required. Having non-white classmates didn't make it any easier or harder for me to graduate.

I then moved to Washington, D.C. and lived there for the next 30 years. It was very diverse, and for a time was dubbed "Chocolate City" because there were more black than white residents. There was nothing unusual about it. I never thought about it. When my son went to Woodrow Wilson High School there he was well in the minority, with only 15% of the 350 students in his class white. Still, I never thought about "diversity" and how his black and Asian friends were "diverse."  (FYI, the school's name has recently been changed because apparently Woodrow Wilson was a racist -- who knew?--  so it's now named for two black teachers nobody ever heard of so I don't remember the new name.)

But now, living in Maine, the country's whitest state, I have to think about diversity every damn minute, and how I am living on the stolen land of the Wabanaki, and how there should be more diversity everywhere, especially on college campuses. 

What I wonder is why: How does diversity help? What does it do? Is it to learn about new cuisine, hear different music or wear different clothing? What, exactly, is so important about it that now every single college campus has to be diverse or it's considered broken? Does that include MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)? Because what I hope is that it keeps turning out the very best engineers by accepting the very smartest students, no matter their skin color, to build our roads and bridges so they don't collapse while we're driving on them.

Just asking.

The Pillow Guy

I've been reading some of my old blog posts and have been surprised at how much funnier they were than the ones I've written lately. I attribute this to the state of the world rather than to any diminished sense of humor on my part. Politics in particular has grabbed my attention, and there's nothing funny there except for Kamala Harris, but cancel culture will not allow me to mine that very deep, very rich resource. 

So no more politics for awhile, at least not until it gets funny which will definitely happen starting with the first debate in August between the dozen or more Republican candidates, a motley crew of has-beens, never-weres and wannabes.

Instead I will focus on a crazy person we see on TV much too often, and that's Mike Lindell, a.k.a. The Pillow Guy. If you never watch FOX News you may not have seen him, but you also will only hear the propaganda of the left and none of the propaganda of the right, which is too bad.  

Anyway, Mike started out making pillows that he said are the best because of his "magic fill" that lets you get a good night's sleep and they cost like 25 bucks which is nuts, right, but okay fine, no problem, not that I would ever buy one. Then he added sheets made from a rare cotton grown only on a tiny sliver of land somewhere near Africa, or maybe Egypt, that makes the softest sheets imaginable. Still, it's relatable -- pillows to sheets. 

Next came slippers which have nothing to do with sheets or pillows except maybe nighttime, okay I'll give him that. But now he's into towels. That's a giant leap -- from pillows to towels -- if you ask me. And the way he advertises his towels is absurd: He says he makes "towels that actually work." 

Has anyone, anywhere, in this country or in any country, even in third world countries where maybe they have things they use as towels, ever seen or heard about or read about a towel that did not work? I mean, if it's a towel, it's gonna do what towels do, which is absorb. It can't help but work; absorbing is in its DNA. Here is the definition of the word:  A towel is a piece of absorbent cloth or paper used for drying or wiping a surface. Towels draw moisture through direct contact.

So, shut up Mike.

Affirmative Action: The Ultimate Insult

You may have noticed there is no "affirmative action" ruling in sports. That's because it's obvious to everyone that minority players, usually black, are exceptionally talented in that realm and in fact rule the roost. So what is affirmative action in education implying? That many black and Hispanic students aren't smart enough to succeed in school, or life, without a handicap? (Nobody seems to care about all the white students who are less than college-qualified.) 

How insulting. Not to mention scary!

Maybe if lower education did a better job early on, more disadvantaged students could seamlessly move on to higher education without getting a leg up. A large part of the problem is the policy of high school teachers who pass minority students on to the next grade, despite their poor reading and math skills, to avoid being seen as racist.

Where's My Free Diploma?

I saw a headline, one among many, that read, "What To Do Now That Student Loan Forgiveness Is Off the Table." 

Here's a crazy idea I offer (for free) to those students who are stunned and shocked by yesterday's SCOTUS ruling: How about you pay it back yourself? 

Here's another crazy idea: Don't go to college if you can't afford it. 

If it's so hard to figure this stuff out, maybe college isn't the right path for you.