My Father Liked To Wear My Shoes

It was weird because he had small feet (9½ or 10 in men's) and I don't (13 or 14 in men's). When he stood in them, he looked absolutely cartoonish: a little man, his feet aswim in pontoons.

Occasionally I'd walk around the house trying to remember where I left my shoes, and in frustration I'd finally ask, "Have you seen my shoes?" He'd reply with something like, "Yeah, I wore them to check the mail" or "I mowed the lawn in them."

I have no idea how it can be comfortable to wear shoes that are bigger than one's own calves, but okay, whaterver.

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First one Reads like Mamet

Is there any line from Shakespeare that sounds more modern than this?

The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers.
–"Henry VI", Act IV, Scene 2

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More, because I don't want to waste another entry on related frippery.

God send everyone their heart's desire!
–"Much Ado About Nothing", Act III, Scene 4

If god sent everyone their heart's desire, no one would be left alive to accept it.

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Heaven hath a hand in these events.
–"Richard II", Act V, Scene 2

If such could be said of any event, so could this: Heaven never stayed a horror.

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I still think about this sometimes

These are also from ~20 years ago:

My father has the most contagious laugh I've ever heard. Some lady on the TV just sang, "I threw my ring down the toilet, 'cause that's where our love went." He started laughing and then so did I. Later, I'll write about seeing "Blankman" with him. It was awesome.

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[Later:]

(It's very likely this won't translate in print.)

Re: Blankman:
I went to see this awful film with my father, in a theater with maybe 10 other people, tops. We'd see everything together and, after all the quality options were seen, we'd lower ourselves to watching truly horrid shit like "Blankman".

In the movie, Damon Wayans (who plays Blankman, a semi-retarded, self-styled superhero) has typical superhero gadgets, but his are ultra-low-class versions thereof – stuff you would expect to see if Batman shopped at Kmart. One of them, for example, is a grappling hook made from a short-stemmed fishing pole. In one scene, Blankman is in an elevator stuck between floors (I can't recall if he was in the elevator when it got stuck or if he got in to help the others out, but I suspect the latter).

The doors to the elevator are opened and cops are lifting people out to safety on the higher floor†. When only Blankman remains inside the box, a cop reaches out his hand and Blankman slaps it away. He can get out on his own, dammit; he's a superhero. Then, from the upper floor, you see Blankman's head slowly rise. After that you see his shoulders, then his arms, and finally you see that he's frantically spinning his little fishing-pole grappling-hook, coming up on his own (absurd use of) power.

At this totally-, ridiculously-stupid scene, my father began to giggle. Then he began to laugh, and added, "What a stupid son of a bitch!". I began to giggle. Then he began to guffaw. Then the people across the center aisle started to laugh; then, the people behind us, too. Soon, and for the rest of the terrible movie, we were all laughing.

The movie may suck beyond all comprehension – not "may", "does" – but it remains among my favorite movie-going experiences, solely because my father found that scene so ridiculous it made him, and therefore the rest of us, laugh.

That was my "Blankman" story.

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It's likely not even Damon Wayans remembers "Blankman", but I will; I still enjoy thinking of this experience occasionally. I can't believe it happened nearly 30 years ago.

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† Fun elevator fact: most elevator-related deaths result from people jumping down to the lower floor when their elevator gets stuck between floors. They jump down, lose their balance, and fall backward into the open shaft. If you're ever in a stuck elevator between floors, climb.

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Got a little teary reading this

From June 9th, 2003:

The Nice Friendliness Of Pets

Occasionally, while I'm sitting here typing, one of my dogs will walk in, with his nails tapping on the tiles as he approaches. Just to alert me that he's near, he'll touch my leg with his nose. It's the cutest thing. That's the extent of it: tap, turn, leave.

I always immediately pat him on the side, and each time it seems to scare him a little, but he's always happy for the attention and will stop and wait for me to finish.

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Been a long time gone, now, nearly 20 years later, but still love and miss those little dudes.

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In the early time of blogs...

... there were things like Friday Five† – a list of five new/different questions posted each Friday to give people something to write about, a prompt for some fun. There were other types with similar prompts; the idea caught on. Here's one of my FF answers, from 19.5 years ago, that I appreciate. (Question 2 was a about quotes. I kinda went nuts with that one, so I've excised it here.)

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It's Monday! What better time to answer the Friday Five?!

1: What do you most want to be remembered for?

I don't want to be remembered. When I go, I'm gone. Leave it at that.

3: What single achievement are you most proud of in the past year?

I've lost some weight.

4: What about the past ten years?

I've lost a considerable amount of weight.

5: If you were asked to give a child a single piece of advice to guide them through life, what would you say?

Don't ever willfully harm another person, and don't take pleasure or profit from others' harm. Other than that, enjoy life and let nothing stand in your way.

Actually, come to think of it, I was talking recently with one of my in-town cousins (a 7 y/o girl) and I told her never to do anything that bores her. I quite like that; it's probably the best advice I'll ever give‡.

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† The original website, fridayfive.org, seems to have vanished entirely. So it goes.

‡ This assumption has (so far) withstood the test of time. I don't think I've offered anything that surmounts this.

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An Old Idea, Resurfaced

Looking thru an old blog of mine that, recent days excepted, I haven't looked an in a very. long. time.

In it, a few months shy of 20 years ago, I had this idea. I still like it (never did it, but I like it). Edited and added to a bit, here it is:

One of my uncles had stupid shit cheaply framed in his bathroom and I stole this idea. I framed a $6.00 a jury-duty check, and a few of my favorite New Yorker cartoons, for instance. But I just had an inspired idea. When I took Photography in high school, I only took one really good picture - it's of a urinal (unfortunately).

So hers's my idea: What if I were to cheaply frame pictures, not of random shit, but of bathroom-stuff themselves (toilets, urinals, sinks, soap dispensers, giant-ass towel loops, whatever else is in bathrooms) and hang them in my bathroom? Is or is that not inspired?

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Harper's New Monthly Magazine

Harper’s, the monthly magazine, was first published in June of 1850, and initially cost $3 per year.

Seems cheap, but:

$3 in 1850 is equivalent in purchasing power to about $121.80 today, an increase of $118.80 over 174 years. The dollar had an average inflation rate of 2.15% per year between 1850 and today, producing a cumulative price increase of 3,960.16%.

(https://www.officialdata.org/us/inflation/1850?amount=3)

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I just subsribed for $46 – an absolute steal!

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Couple quotes

Margaret Mead: "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has."

And then there's this bit of angry perfection from Woodrow Wilson: "A little group of willful men, representing no opinion but their own, have rendered the government of the United States helpless and contemptible." (March 4,1917)

Another old one

Posting this here primarily because I miss my dad. This was from the night of or day after the November 5th, 2004 federal elections in America – an absolute debacle for sense and right:

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My father fairly nailed it: "Sure they already have an agenda. Republicans have been planning for this since FDR. Remember that when Roosevelt came into office he had to break the stranglehold the rich had on the country to keep people from starving to death. Everything he managed to do with the New Deal will be reversed or relaxed. What we're going to see is the Anti-New Deal. {…} There are two basic views of governance. They can overlap in places but their extremes are perfectly opposed. One is the view that governments have a responsibility to soothe the brutality of nature; that the reason we form governments is to provide a safety net and for that we agree to pay taxes. The other view is that governments should be limited in their abilities and the market should be left to function on its own. The second extreme - pure monetary greed - will now be allowed to function freely. Workers' ability to unionize will be limited; punitive damages will be arbitrarily limited (as has already happened in this activist Court, regarding, for example, a person's ability to sue over first-time excessive discrimination {long example excised}); tax-laws for companies, which are already anemic, will be further relaxed; and everything will be commercialized, including and especially Social Security - which will disappear as we know it. You're right McAuliffe doesn't get it; Bush's handlers now have no limits. And they all agree so there's no hope of repeating Clinton's first two years. Bush is better than Coolidge for the Rightist elite - well, that's redundant - for the elite in this country. Coolidge at least had an understanding of economics. Bush knows nothing, so he'll do and say whatever Cheney et al. want. He's too stupid to think things over first."

Call it the Old Deal, watch the country slip back into our ugly plutocratic past, and remember: What's good for the market, is good for Americatm.

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This may be overwrought and dire, but we were only saved from it, insofar as we were saved from it, by incompentence. In fact, it's all that's saved us in the years of conservative dominance since. The 2000 election was consequential to a degree none of us realistically thought possible.

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McGovern and McCarthy

From The Personal Archives; November 11, 2002:

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Last week I listened to George McGovern and Eugene McCarthy speak at Lewis & Clark College in Portland. These are the types of people who can bring liberalism back from the wasteland of pejoratives: Brilliant former teachers, who allow intelligence and reason to dictate their political beliefs. McGovern - whose hand I shook twice - was the better speaker, and the only one who spoke wholly extemporaneously, but they both struck common themes of leftism, intellectualism, reason, fairness, equality, and logic. Both seemed to oppose the impending war [W's war in Iraq] by taking a 'show me something' stand (instead of the flat-out dog-wagging, oil-grabbing stand I'd have taken); and both compared the current Congress's laying at the feet of the President, to the Congress of the Viet Nam-era, which did the same thing for so long at so great a cost. Both called for a government which cares more for people than for businesses. And for congress to do its job re: the Advice and Consent Clause of The US Constitution (which was the focus of the Senate Lecture Series; and which McCarthy thought was too often taken to mean advice, then consent). Here are some notes; McGovern's first: -He's right around 6 feet tall, but thin, so that he seems almost small. Good looking guy, relaxed, casual speaker, seemingly comfortable. Stood behind a podium and spoke without notes. -A questioner asked him if he was 'pissed off' about Nixon's dirty tricks in the 1972 campaign (which probably cost McGovern the election) and he said "You could put it that way {huge laugh}. I wish the election were held a year later. {big laugh}" -His comments were often remarkably well considered and reasonable. He said that the saddest part of the resolution Congress recently passed in favor of Bush was passed by Senators who would give eloquent speeches about how dangerous an invasion of Iraq would be, but then, in the last couple minutes of their speeches, would say "but I feel its important to support the President". "Part of patriotism," McGovern said "is speaking out against things you feel will bring harm to the nation." (History after all will not record that you voted for the measure reluctantly! And if you make that point it will regard you as craven.) -He then went on to say that most of the Congresses most aggressive members had never fought a war - didn't know what it felt like to watch a bomberful of friends explode on the runway, or to see another plane in your formation get destroyed by anti-aircraft fire, both of which McGovern did firsthand - and said, he'd like to say to some of these irrational hawks, that if they feel it's so important to invade Iraq, that perhaps they'd want, finally, to be among the first sent in to battle. "Some of them aren't in the best shape, but at least they could draw sniper-fire away from our troops. {more huge applause}" McCarthy: -Sat behind a small, white-trimmed table and spoke with the help of notes. He's old and frail, had trouble even standing up, but his mind seems as alert as ever. He was surprisingly funny - speaking for example of President's projects to get rid of, what's called, the "Federal Flock" of pidgins in DC. Carter's administration bred peregrine falcons to feed on the pidgins but each of them died. Reagan also had a plan: "He was not going to use science or mechanical devices. They actually installed stuffed snakes in the magnolia trees on the White House lawn. I don't know whether that was successful or not, but it was one of his commitments to Creationism." -He looks like an older David McCullough. -He spoke at length about two Amendments he feels should be repealed: 20th & 22nd. The 20th Amendment moved Inauguration Day from March 4 to January 20, thereby shortening a President-elect's time to carefully set up his Cabinet; and - he noted jokingly - forcing his (and maybe one day, her) first month in office to be February - the month in which more people die and less gets done (Clinton nominated three would-be attorneys general in February, for example; if he was inaugurated in March, he would have nominated one in April and gotten off on a better, speedier start, he said), than any other. The reasoning behind moving the election to January was, he said, that having an Inauguration Day in March left too much time for a lame-duck President to screw up the country. If that's so, he continued, the 22nd Amendment, made a President a lame-duck for four years! And, really in some cases for eight years, because there's a known limit to the holder's time in office. He may also have mentioned that the Amendment is unconstitutional - contrary to the Founder's intent - since the Legislative Branch forced a limit on the Executive that it did not also take, and force on the Judicial - but I can't quite remember his wording on this point. -He said Congress does silly things because it is made up of so many former state legislators - who bring a disrespect for the Congress and the President and ridiculous policies like balanced budgets. -He said that at during Democratic convention of 1968, the Secret Service told him his hotel room was not bugged, but not to talk on the telephone because it was bugged by the federal government. The Secret Service told him this! It shot up in my estimation! -He spoke about how the striving for "security" knows no bounds, because "You can never have enough security. It's waiting to happen all the time. And the trouble is there's no one to protect us against it unless it's a Senate committee with constitutional responsibility. You can't count on the press," because, it will always be complicit in the taking of civil rights - as it was during the "anti-communist movement of the 1950s - what became the McCarthyism. Everyone in the country was suspect." Only a handful of newspapers in the country, maybe four "could be said to have raised a real challenge - out of all the papers in the country. Two in Wisconsin, one in Florida, one newspaper chain in California. In the whole country the press surrendered. They did the same thing in Viet Nam."
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Update: Looking thru a folder of old and random shit, I found a Word.doc I made for my dad (he understood Word.docs and had folders filled with them; some with similarly labled photos – we like what we like) of photos taken of each of the speakers on these nights: George McGovern and Eugene McCarthy, mentioned above, and former Senator Mark Hatfield (R-OR), unmentioned above, who hosted both men (and perhaps others in the series). I've screengrabbed and posted it as a picture here.

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My.One.Talent

I'm good at nothing of value. But one of the things I am good at is colating randome bits of information in, I think, a fun way. Here's an example of something I wrote on March 24, 2002 in respose to news that there was possiblity still an American POW from HW Bush's Iraq War. The source article – now lost to the Internet rubbish bin – was from the not-exactly-trustworthy Washington Times.

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The Washington Times reported that Iraq may have an American POW, previously thought to have been killed in action in the Gulf War. How would you like to be this guy? He survives an air-to-air missile attack only to be held prisoner without the knowledge of his native country for 10 1/2 years! Think of everything he missed: George Bush's post-war job-approval/popular-opinion free-fall. Magic Johnson's retirement because of HIV; and his short-lived comeback. Chernobyl. Dahmer. Ross Perot. The 'comeback' election of Bill Clinton - and the related early scandals. The Tonight Show war. The rise of CNN, and the rest of cable news (MSNBC, FOX News, Bloomberg). The Rodney King beating and subsequent LA riots. The spate of black church burnings. The February 26, 1993 attack on the World Trade Center. The Frisco earthquake. Hillary's not-so-successful health care plan. The Waco whackos. All but one of the Chicago Bulls championships - and both Michael Jordan comebacks. The Connie Chung-Dan Rather co-anchor debacle. Jackie O and Dick Nixon's deaths. The cessation of Major League play in the 1994 season - including the first missed World Series in 90 years. The Republican near-sweep in the '94 elections; and the related rise and fall of Newt Gingrich. Rudy Giuliani. The OJ trial. Too many great movies to even mention. The sudden -- if too long in coming -- popularity of Seinfeld and its finale. The entire run of Friends. The Spice Girls and their equally-totally-crappy knockoffs; Britney and her ilk. The Unabomber's capture. Clinton's reelection. Diana's death. Hale-Bopp. The endlessly expanding Whitewater investigation. Lewinsky. Clinton's impeachment. The resultant strong Democratic showing in 1998. The many homeruns. Astronaut John Glenn redux. John John's death. The money-backed rise of George W. All the fun that came from President Gore's election and subsequent defeat. Senator Clinton. The many school-shootings. Of course, the attacks of September 11th. Enron's collapse -- the largest corporate collapse in history. Our right-wing shadow government. The Internet!

And those are just domestic happenings! He also missed the final break-up of the Soviet Union (and maybe the August coup). Hubbell Space Telescope's Deep Field View. Mars Pathfinder. The assassination of Yitzhak Rabin. The Yugoslav civil war, and breakup. The fighting in Kosovo. The reversal of British politics, from Conservative to Labour. Shumaker-Levi 9. Yeltsin's rise and fall in Russia. The Olympics in Barcelona, Albertville, Lillehammer, Atlanta, Nagano, Sydney, and Salt Lake City. The attacks on American interests abroad. The International Space Station. The ongoing post-Camp David intifada in Israel/Palestine. The War on Terrorism.

And all the events I didn't mention.

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Of course all of this presuposed that he had no access to news at all – and that he ever actually existed. Since no further reporting on him ever came, it's safe to say he probably didn't – as a long-held POW, at least.

Update: I'm good at one other thing: recalling long blocks of spoken text.

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A.Thing.Noticed

Since, like, August, I've been watching more movies – mainly first-time-for-mes. Just now, looking around here, I noticed something I'd forgotten: that I had been writing about movies here.

Recently, I've been adding thoughts on Letterboxd and BlueSky, but I'm unsure why I'd forgotten about the posts here. I'll remedy that as I see more flicks. And, considering the costs poured into this site, I should probably also post other things.

So maybe I'll make that a 2024 resolution: to actually use this blog for something other than the album/watchlist/sneeze posts it's devolved into.

Doesn't seem that big of a change. Plus, no one knows about this place anyway, so I may as well have some fun in private.

Update: I've done precisely that with my entry for "Nine to Five".

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2023.November.Watched

Clippers–Magic (MacBook)
Platonic (S01E04-08) (TV)
Warriors-Thunder (MacBook)
Platonic (S01E09-10) (TV)
Nate Bargatze: Hello World (MacBook)
Warriors-Pistons (MacBook)
Knicks-Clippers (MacBook)
Nuggets-Warriors (MacBook)
The Equilizer (MacBook)
Laura (MacBook)
Cavs-Warriors (MacBook)
Wolves-Warriors (MacBook)
Wolves-Warriors (MacBook)
Nuggets-Clippers (MacBook)
The Equalizer 2 (MacBook)
Warriors-Rockets (MacBook)
Pacers-Hawks (MacBook)
Hannah Waddingham: Home for Christmas (TV)
Warriors-Spurs (MacBook)
The Killer (MacBook)
Kings-Warriors (MacBook)

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A weirdly short list of shit and I'm struggling to recall why. Maybe the basketball games' lengths, I dunno. Make up and fill in your own reason, I don't mind.

26 titles.

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2023.November.Sneezes

You thought last month had a buncha sneezes! This month had 95, which, he writes this lazily, may be the most in any month so far in this dumb accounting.

What's wild, is I started the month with like 19 or 20 sneezes in the first two or three days. Then I didn't sneeze again for like a week, maybe a week+, befor resuming my standard couple/few sneezes a day.

Weird, wild stuff.

Thank you for your attention.

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