D.C.'s Police State

Clueless Democrats are having conniption fits about President Trump's decision to send in the National Guard to curb crime on the streets of our nation's capital. As a former resident of that city, I applaud the decision and only wish it had been done while I lived there. 

To register my approval, I sent the following Letter to the Editor at the New York Times in response to an article on the subject. It was printed two days ago, edited for space by the staff:

Re “Criminal Fights Crime," ( Aug. 17):

Crime remains rampant in Washington, but it’s nothing new. I lived there from 1970 to 2009. Almost everyone I knew had been in some way victimized.

At night I carried a baseball bat while walking my dog in our affluent Chevy Chase neighborhood. During the day I locked the doors behind me when I took the trash down to the end of my driveway. I slept poorly when my husband was out of town, despite the fact that we had a home security system.

During those years I was mugged by three teenage assailants in the Adams Morgan neighborhood. My 19-year-old son had his bicycle taken from him in Chinatown by a group of thugs who had surrounded him. I had cars stolen twice, was awakened by a would-be intruder at my Capitol Hill townhouse and mourned two friends — a married couple — murdered during a home invasion in their Logan Circle neighborhood. One of my friends was raped, another recently slashed while entering his home. The list goes on.

Andrea Rouda
Freeport, Me.

The First Gay Pope?

Pope Leo with his BFF and personal secretary, Father Edgard Rimaycuna.

The current pope, Leo XIV, is a groundbreaker on several fronts: Chicago-born Robert Francis Prevost is the first pope born in the U.S., the first to hold American and Peruvian citizenship, and the first to have a live-in gay lover. At least if you ask me. 

The 69-year-old's recent decision to "break from tradition" and, rather than live alone in the customary papal lodgings, share an apartment with four roommates including his "longtime closest companion" certainly points in that direction.

Hey, I'm Jewish -- these days I've got other things to worry about. Gay, schmay -- who cares. But it seems nutty for the Catholics to have a gay pope as their leader. Considering their decades-long coverup of widespread and systemic child abuse by priests, you'd think they would aim for a lower profile, sexuality-wise.

Oh well. I guess even popes get lonely.

Stupid Is As Stupid Does

One of my favorite maxims that I came across long ago is, "The only reason that Man tops the evolutionary list is because he wrote the list." Surely if all the other animals could read and write, we would be somewhere near the bottom.

An excellent example of how lame and clueless our species is can be found in what is referred to as the "9-9-9," a ballpark tradition for the last decade. It entails eating nine hot dogs and drinking nine beers during the course of a 9-inning baseball game. Sad but true, many people opt for this revolting activity which has no reward other than saying you did it. One person who thought it was a good idea wrote an article that appears in today's Wall Street Journal, in which he mentions it is "against the advice of every cardiologist ever." 

Inherent in the challenge is avoiding vomiting on anyone sitting near you. Also, it helps if you are brain-dead.

Nothing Is Real

The image above is my latest piece of work. Isn't is pretty? I created it last night, right before I went to bed. The best part is that it took less than one minute to produce, and there were no dirty paintbrushes to clean since unlike most of my paintings it was not done in oils. Instead, I used Artificial Intelligence. 

Yes, that's right, I made it using Grok. All I had to do was open the app and describe the image I wanted, and within 60 seconds this popped up. But I decided to add a window and change the background color, and told the app. It then sent me this image:

In 2025, nothing is real. Just keep that in mind the next time you read anything, see anything and hear anything. (BTW, there are exceptions: this post is real.)

All Advertising, All the Time

When I was growing up in New York, my parents attended the theater often and took me and my sister along to the hit musicals. The lights of Broadway were thrilling, as was every minute of every show. From the first notes of the orchestra to the exciting finale, the magical world of make-believe was always engrossing, capped with the crescendo of wild applause from the audience. I loved it. 

Hoping for that feeling again, a few years ago my husband and I bought season tickets to the Maine State Music Theater, located one town over. 

Despite great sets and talented performers, whatever magical feeling that may have surfaced during last night's production of West Side Story was squashed at the outset by an infomercial for the theater. The marketing director himself yammered on for too long, plugging the theater's sponsors. Among them were local bars and restaurants, a few banks, a curtain shop and a deli, their logos projected onto a black screen while the names of each were read aloud. The audience was invited to give each one of them a hand for their generosity. (Clap, clap, clap.)

The theater's marketing director doing his job -- onstage.

After that came descriptions of next year's roster, each one deserving more applause. Then special events -- clap, clap-- with discounts available in the lobby -- clap, clap, clap. I wonder -- does clapping for a bank or a grocery store differ from clapping for the actual performers? 

This boring litany happens at every show, diluting any enthusiasm one might have had going into the evening. But last night there was a bonus: Besides the pre-game yammering, a video shown during the intermission featured a giant talking head -- that of the Artistic Director this time -- spouting the same information we had heard 90 minutes earlier. Far from being magical, it was more like being at a used car auction, or maybe a bank foreclosure of mobile homes. (We're not going back.)

Jumping to Conclusions

Not every person who likes to cut up an avocado and spread it on a piece of toast for breakfast lives in Brooklyn, goes to yoga classes and has a pierced nose. These generalizations are popular among people who lack functioning brain cells and thus parrot what they hear on a podcast or see in a meme.

Summer is not always fun, full of picnics and swimming and sunshine as depicted in TV commercials. More often it's devilishly hot, severely buggy and overwhelmingly muggy, with devastating thunderstorms that can cause flooding and even death. Constant itching, asthmatic attacks, sunburns, profuse sweating and a debilitating lack of energy are the true signs of summer.

Not all white women named Karen are demanding, hate black people and think they know what's best in every situation. The two Karens that I know are both very soft-spoken and sweet, and if anything, self-deprecating to a fault, and certainly are not racist.

It's possible to be a Republican and still find fault with President Trump. Not all Trump voters think alike, which is vastly different from Democrats who all repeat whatever nonsense they heard Anderson Cooper or Rachel Maddow say on TV the night before.

Just because it is round with a hole in the middle, not everything sold as a bagel is actually a bagel. Some of them are imposters -- just round white bread with a hole in the middle. One way to tell is the presence of blueberries, cranberries or chocolate chips, all dead giveaways that you are not dealing with the real thing.

Owning a cat is not less work than owning a dog. Scooping their litter never ends. Neither does changing their water and feeding them food they will reject. Many, if not most, cats are incredibly needy and crave constant attention. Thinking they are aloof and standoffish just confirms that you never owned one.

What I Do For Love

My husband has a vegetable garden that he may love more than he loves me. At least, he loves every individual vegetable like a mother with a newborn child. Oddly enough, to show that I love him, I have to eat them. And eat them. And eat them. That means constant ingestion of whatever happens to be growing, be it broccoli, carrots, kale, lettuce, peppers, squash, zucchini, onions, cucumbers, tomatoes, beets -- are you nauseous yet?

In the last couple of weeks, the zucchinis started coming at a rapid pace. That means zucchini omelets, grilled zucchini, fried zucchini, zucchini with pasta, zucchini and whatever. Despite a growing revulsion to the vegetable I have been very accommodating, but hey -- what are wives for? Until last week, when I was suddenly sickened with a severe case of -- excuse me for writing the heinous word -- diarrhea. Like really bad. Like shoot me bad.

It wasn't stopping and finally I did what I always do before calling a physician: I checked the internet. I learned that an abundance of zucchini can cause an abundance of diarrhea, especially in people with pre-existing stomach issues like IBS. That's me! There is even something worse called "zucchini poisoning" which I don't have yet but there's still time since I ate some for dinner last night before I googled it.

If we ever renew our vows, I am definitely inserting a line saying I don't have to eat the stuff he grows.

D.C. Hellscape

Ignorant people are outraged at President Trump's decision to call out the National Guard as peacekeepers in our nations' capital.  Following is a tiny part of why it's a good idea.

From 1970 until 2009 I lived in Washington, D.C. and just across the line in Maryland, with time off for good behavior (four years in Salt Lake City, a year in Baltimore and a year in Berkeley, California). During my D.C. days I was mugged by three teenage assailants in the parking lot of a Safeway supermarket, had my car stolen from a repair shop three blocks from my home, had a glass entry door broken at night by a would-be intruder at my home six blocks from the Capitol and lost two friends to murder during their home invasion in the Logan Circle neighborhood. 

Another friend was raped by two men while she was pregnant with twins, her husband forced to watch, in their Georgetown ground-floor apartment. More recently, the young son of a close friend had his throat slit one night as he was about to enter his home in the trendy neighborhood of Adams Morgan, on the same street where Justice Sotomayor lived.

I did not have one friend or acquaintance who was not the victim of crime while living in D.C. My young son -- at the time he was 19 -- had his bike taken from him just blocks from the White House, by a group of thugs who surrounded him.

Our family endured three weeks of terror in 2002 during the reign of the so-called "D.C. Sniper," when 14 random people were shot down -- seven fatally -- on the streets of the city for no reason.

I walked my dog carrying a baseball bat at night and locked my doors when I took the trash down to the end of the driveway, even in daytime.

I never slept when my husband was out of town on business, despite the fact that we had an alarm system installed. 

That's why it's a good idea.

Drunk Post, Or I Don't Care About Your Grandchildren

I had two big glasses of wine with dinner, which is twice as much as I can handle, and so now I'm pretty drunk but had to get this down before I forget.

Some people are obnoxious and ridiculously self-absorbed. Tonight I had dinner with two of them. They talked and talked and talked and talked and talked about themselves and their children and their children's jobs and then their grandchildren and how they were conceived, which was hard because their son is gay and married to a man. We had to hear every detail about the conception and the egg donors and the two surrogate mothers, and one of the fathers is the father of one child and the other is the father of the other one but they are still twins, etc., ad infinitum. ad nauseam, and then came the pictures. So many pictures.

People with grandchildren are the worst. They think people are interested, but nobody is.

Not one question was put to me. Not one shred of interest was directed at me or my husband or my husband's brother, who they know suffered a traumatic brain injury years ago.

Then it was over. Thank god. At least the food was good.

Note to self: Never go out again.

Artificial Unintelligence

If you ask me, I'm much smarter than AI. I'm also smarter than my phone and my computer and all those apps and Siri and Alexa and the whole lot of them. They think they know everything but they're wrong.

I'll give you an example. Not long ago, maybe an hour or so, I ordered a new pair of running shoes online. (Full disclosure -- I don't run anymore because I had a new hip installed nine years ago and my doc said that I could keep running if I wanted to but that I would "use up" my new hip and have to get it done again in like ten years, if I lived that long. So I walk in running shoes, okay?)

Anyway, I bought a pair and since then my computer and my phone have been flooded with ads for running shoes, including the brand I just bought. If AI is so smart, how come it can't grok that I don't need running shoes anymore since I just bought a new pair and maybe try to sell me some socks instead? Because it's dumb, that's why. It should be called AS for Artificial Stupidity.

Enough With the Talking Babies Already!

The whole thing of making videos featuring celebrities as babies was once a bright, new and original idea that was hysterical! The internet was instantly flooded with talking-baby versions of Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin and the casts of The Sopranos and The Golden Girls and My Cousin Vinny and Seinfeld. It was definitely worth a few hardy guffaws -- at first. But then it was everywhere, with everyone who could figure out how to do it doing it. And now it's just been- there-done-that annoying.

Sadly, that's what happens in a society where only a special few people possess the wits and intelligence to create something brand new. Through overuse by people scrolling desperately for anything different, ultimately it ends up on the trash heap of annoying copycats.

I hope and pray that happens to AI, and soon.

Metamorphoses

Tom Cruise in "Risky Business", 1983.

1) Conceived in 2004 by a group of college students, Facebook originally served as a catalog of who was "hot" and who was not, a precursor to today's dating websites like Tinder that was limited to Harvard students. In just 19 years it has turned into a miserable depository of anything and everything. Just this morning a friend of mine posted a video of a starving Israeli hostage held by Hamas inside a dark tunnel, emaciated and digging his own grave. 

2) Happy couples who are madly in love get married and then years later the husband murders his wife, or vice versa.

3) Actor Tom Cruise was once beloved by all, and now he is considered to be a creep into plastic surgery and Scientology who lies about doing his own movie stunts.

4) This blog was started in 2007 to be funny, and today I'm writing this.

Death Keeps Happening

Actress Loni Anderson, ex-wife of actor Burt Reynolds and former blonde bombshell on TV's WKRP in Cincinnati that aired from 1978-1982, recently died, just days shy of her 80th birthday. According to reports she had  battled a "serious illness" for the last year. 

Sad news, yes, but surprising? No. Yet her friend and fellow sitcom actress Barbara Eden, star of I Dream of Jeannie back in the day, posted online that she was "stunned" by the news. (BTW, Barbara is now 93 so she better be prepared for something even more stunning.)

How could anyone be stunned about the death of someone who was 80 years old and had cancer? Or even who was just 80 years old without cancer? Or even young with cancer? Or without cancer and any age? In fact, anyone at all?

We all need to get with the program and accept the fact that everyone dies -- at any time, at any age, for a variety of reasons. You can be sad about the death of a friend or loved one -- or depressed, suicidal, grief-stricken and bereft -- but seriously, you cannot be stunned, which basically means amazed, shocked, astonished, surprised, horrified and dumbstruck. 

Until we all learn to view death as a natural end to life, we will never feel relaxed.

Good Dog! (Bad Human!)

Reading the paper this afternoon, I came across two stories on the same page. One was about a teenager whose foot was badly burned at Yellowstone National Park when he stepped through the crusty earth near a boiling hot geyser. Having been to Yellowstone many times, I know that there are many signs warning visitors to steer clear of the geysers, as they pose a serious danger. So the kid must have ignored those signs and been foolhardy and oh well, too bad for him. I cared not a whit.

The next story was about a dog rescued in Parkland, Florida during a Category 5 hurricane last year by a state trooper who received a radio call about an animal trapped in rising waters. It went into great detail about how the dog's collar had gotten caught on a fence after his owner, a 24-year-old brat, left him tethered by the side of the road because he didn't want to take him along as he raced to escape the hurricane. 

I cried reading the second article, imagining the terror the dog had felt until his rescue. I hated the dog's owner, a lowly human, and was elated to read he had been tracked down and punished, and that Florida passed a law making the abandonment of animals during a storm a felony.

There is no punchline. People are truly the worst, and believe me, it's upsetting that I am one. Dogs are so much nicer, kinder, sweeter, more loyal and loving, except for pit bulls, whose inborn nature has been destroyed by generations of human owners.

How I'm Different From Kamala Harris

I'm not a moron.

I speak in complete sentences.

I'm never offended when people pronounce my name incorrectly.

I do not cackle.

I'm actually Jewish and my child never once called me "momala."

I told everyone that Joe Biden was demented.