My Sunday Feeling

 I got a text Thursday afternoon asking me if I had heard that C had died.  I had not.  Then again, I hadn’t heard anything about C in years other than he was in bad health.  I heard that from a man-one of the baseball dads at school- that used to work with him.  

I grew up with C.  He and my brother Dave were buddies. I seem to recall that we went to church together but I may be making things up.  That was a long time ago.  But we in school together from 5th grade through high school.

C could fairly be described as a recluse.  Which is kinda hard to do in this town. I called one of his high school friends to ask if he had heard anything.  Naturally he had not.  He said he last he saw C about 12 years ago.  After they had visited he asked C if he wanted to get some lunch sometime.  “No” was his reply.  I had better results.  I ran into C in the courthouse @ 8 years ago.  He said he needed to sit if we were going to visit.  Bad back.  “I never took care of myself,” he said I guess by way of explanation.  

Like his other friend I asked if he wanted to get lunch.  “Maybe,” he said.  I handed him my card.  Told him to call me.  Never happened.

I sent a message to his cousin.  Asked her if she had heard about C.  She was shocked.  Then again she hadn’t heard from him in years so she said.  I got a text from Baseball Dad. He said that it was his understanding that C had died in hospice care.  I heard back from C’s cousin.  She called C’s sister who confirmed her brother’s death.  

I think it’s pretty clear that C didn’t want many people to know even this final aspect of his business.  He was married at the time of his death and clearly she didn’t exactly broadcast his passing from a billboard on the highway.  In fact, I think I’ve only seen her once.  I couldn’t pick her out of a lineup if I had to. 

But I found it fascinating that people that would otherwise be somewhat in a position to know what was going on in his life did not have a clue.  Not a clue.  As I told one of my brothers, it was as if he didn’t really exist.  

As I have alluded to earlier it’s pretty hard to be a recluse in a town like Little Rock where everybody knows or is related to everybody else.  My wife has said that I am an introvert.  The first time she told me that was 5 minutes before I went onstage to basically do stand up for the old radio show “Tales From The South.”  I think I stared at her in disbelief as I ascended the stairs to do my shtick.  

Hell, I lived by myself until I met M.  So I guess I was an introvert to some degree.  But I was out in the world.  I ran my traps and regularly went up and down the contact list.  Truth be told, sha and I both like our downtime.  She watches movies in the den while reading feminist theology  I watch baseball while reading Sports Illustrated.  She confesses to being a homebody.  I’m getting there. We do a lot of takeout instead of dealing with the public.

But if our friends went more than a week without hearing from either of us, they would be concerned.  But the Deacon and I, though we have turned into “stay at home” types, are out there in the world.  We really exist.  And I like to think that folks would make themselves available if trouble was at the door.  

Which brings me back to C.  Obviously he didn’t want to have anything to do with many people, including his family and folks he grew up with.  His choice for whatever reason.  And he had every right to run his life the way he saw fit.  He was an honorable man and good and useful citizen.  

But when I die if I die, I hope I will have had the chance to visit one last time with people that I love or loved.  People that have been good to me and important to me in equal measure.

I hope C was happy in his solitary life. 

As for me, I’m sorry that another fleck of my childhood is gone. This seems to be happening with some frequency the older I get.

I wish he had called me for lunch.  

My Sunday Feeling

 Don't take this the wrong way.  And everybody takes everything the wrong way nowadays.  But TRY not to take this the wrong way.  

But I don't much get Taylor Swift.  And I concede that I just may be one of the few people in the US-or known universe even- that doesn't get her.  She is worth a billion dollars, is selling out concert venues all over western civilization, and has a movie out that I'm sure will do boffo box office.  Clearly this my problem.

I won't go see it.  Not that I have anything against her but I'm more at home with Talking Heads.  And I concede that most Swifties as they have come irritatingly to be known probably don't get Talking Heads or Tom Tom Club.  That's OK.  It's a free country.  

I wouldn't be able to pick out a single Taylor Swift song out of a lineup.  Except maybe that one she did on Saturday Night Live about what a jerk Jake Gyllenhaal is.  Like they say hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. Especially when she is armed with a Taylor Grand Acoustic.  My buddy the music critic, whose opinion is entitled to great weight, informs me that she is about the only female performer out there who writes her own stuff.  So there’s that.  Good for her.

I concede that she is a lovely girl.  Not Margot Robbie smoking but normal lovely like my stepdaughter and other young women you can easily find on any college campus or bar around here.And it is my understanding that she has a social conscious and is involved with "getting out the vote" and other lefto causes. Ain't it a hell of a note that being interested in issues like that are considered to be damn near Communistic by some people.

But despite all of her many virtues, both known and unknown to me, to adopt the language of the Grand Jury, I don't turn on the NFL to watch Taylor Swift.  

As everyone must know by now, Swift is friends, dating, involved with,WHATEVER, tight end Travis Kelce of the Chiefs.  And she has been seen in attendance at Chiefs games with Kelce's mom in his box.  

This is all well and good.  Except that every time Kelce, who is as good as they get, makes a play on the field, which is not infrequent, they cut to his box for the reaction of TAYLOR SWIFT!

This is not why I watch football.  I could give a rip about what is going on in the private box.  I could give a rip about the status of the relationship, whatever it may be, of Taylor and Travis.  

But you can bet your Capital One card that the NFL and the Chiefs do.  Because the presence of Taylor Swift at their games brings more eyeballs than would usually be watching.  And if those extra eyeballs are watching, odds are a good many of them are buying merch online.  Probably with the aforementioned Capital One card.

Which leads me straightaway to the following question.  Wonder what Dick Butkus would think about all of this?

Butkus, the old Chicago Bear, passed away last week.  He is considered one of the best linebackers to ever trod the middle of a football field.  He was a little before my time.  I only saw him, and the hapless Bears, play a couple of times on TV.  Perhaps if the Chicago team physicians were more competent and perhaps if Soldier Field hadn't been paved with Astroturf Butkus's knees could have allowed him to play at least through my high school days.  

Butkus played with an intensity bordering on savagery.  He didn't just tackle people.  He took them apart.  He led with his helmet.  He hit guys late.  He routinely got into fights on the field.

I remember watching the Bears on Monday Night Live one night with my dad. I was probably 15. Buck grew up in what WGN calls the Chicagoland area and was a Bears fan, poor man.  I remember two things about the game we watched together.  The Bears were coached at the time by a rotund former lineman named Abe Gibron who looked about what you would think a guy named Abe Gibron would look like.  Buck had a buddy named Gene back in Indiana who used to date Abe's sister.  Buck said that Abe's sister looked just like him. Gene said she was one hell of a gal and a lot of fun.  

The other thing I remember from the game was Butkus clotheslining a hapless wide receiver simply for having the temerity to run a crossing route in front of him.  Mind you, the guy was not in possession of a football at the time he almost got decapitated.  The old Detroit Lion defensive tackle Alex Karras was doing the color for ABC that night.  

He laughed.  

Clearly the game has changed and for a damn good reason.  It was a blood sport in the day of Alex Karras and Dick Butkus.  They would have to clean it up considerably to play in today's NFL.  Otherwise, they would get tossed in every game and get fined and suspended out the wazoo.  

But I would like to think that Butkus would find all of this Taylor Swift stuff to be complete foolishness (or other words to that effect that he would probably employ) and a distraction from the serious business of men maiming each other.  And if he were playing against the Chiefs today I'm sure old Dick would figure out some way, even in today's relatively sanitized NFL,  to kick Travis Kelse's ass.  Just to show Taylor Swift that she didn't mean jack to him.

I wish Travis and Kelse well.  To the extent that you can "know" anybody in the worlds of music or sports, they seem to be allright.   But I don't watch the NFL to get reaction shots of Taylor Swift.  

And if I'm Travis Kelse, I'm breathing a sigh of relief that Dick Butkus is no longer on the field.  Because I have a feeling that old # 51 would have a special way of letting Kelse know what he thought about all of this folderol.  

    

      

My Sunday Feeling

I haven’t done this for awhile.  There are any number of reasons.  I mainly confess to a feeling of malaise-to use Jimmy Carter’s infamous word-that I suppose has been brought on by all of the goings on in DC, New York and Florida involving former President Trump and his confederates.  That and it has been 200 degrees.  

But as I write this it is a beautiful fall day.  I am out on the porch.  I will be doing the Government classes on Monday and  college football is back on the tube.  

I feel better now.

I ran into a friend of mine in the grocery store today.  She happens to be married to the teacher that I am filling in for on Monday.

“So what are you going to talk about?” she asked. “Nothing much going on out there in the legal world is there?”  She rolled her eyes as she is wont to do.

Here’s what I told her.

If I get the green light, which is rare, I would state to the class that for the life of me I do not understand what made a group of people think that because their candidate lost an election they were justified in violently attacking the seat of representative democracy in this country.  I would further state that while I am no Constitutional scholar-or any other scholar for that matter- I was, and remain to be, stunned by the insane legal theories put out there by lawyers that should have none better.  And some of them are in the process of losing their licenses over their attempts to use the legal system to overturn elections.  And some of them may lose their freedom as well.  

I wouldn’t want to serve time in a Georgia state prison.  Would you?

For the life of me I do not understand how those lawyers got sucked in.  But as they say, men go mad in packs.  Along with two or three women in this case. Here’s your proof.

And men evidently become punks in packs as well.

Three of the so called “Proud Boys” caught fairly serious time last week for their roles in, basically, fomenting an insurrection.  Enrico Tarrio, their nominal leader, was given 22 years.  I was stuck by a couple of things that happened last week.  First of all I loved the picture of Tarrio that ran with many of the stories about his demise.  There he was in dark glasses, cigarette dangling rakishly from his lips, while in the breast pocket of the tactical vest he was rocking, was stored what for all the world appeared to be two yellow cans of the fizzy stuff my wife drinks.  

Some revolutionary.  I bet Che never drank sparkling water out in the field.

Secondly, I note from the accounts of the sentencing hearing for these guys, they all apologized for their actions, recanted their former beliefs and asked the Court for mercy.  Some cried as they addressed the Judge.  

No blindfolds or cigarettes for these guys.  No refusals to recognize the authority of the Court. No wasting everybody’s time with rambling speeches during allocution.  

Just scared white boys not wanting to face the music.

The Proud Boys, at least as embodied by these three, aren’t revolutionaries.  They are criminals. And they don’t have much pride.  

I don’t get it.  I will never get it.

And I hope to never see it again.  Then again, one of our former Governors has opined that if Trump is not restored to the Oval Office then 2024 will be the last year that elections are decided by ballots instead of bullets.  Or some damn fool thing.   

The fact that Mike Huckabee would give voice to such an irresponsible thought tells you everything you need to know about the sorry state of public discourse.

I don’t get it.  

And by the way, I consider myself a fair person.  If Enrico wasn’t packing fizzy water in that pic I wish somebody would let me know.  I will run a retraction.

He has a certain reputation as a tough guy to maintain.  And he needs to maintain it for 22 years after all.

 

 

My Sunday Feeling

 I do not pick up the pen today to write about United States vs. Donald Trump.  I don’t know about you but I tend to find all of this overwhelming at times.  So I would rather talk about something important.

College sports.

In the last 10 days the college conferences map went kablooey to use the technical word.  Or kerflooey as an old country lawyer of my acquaintance used to say.  Either will work nicely under the circumstances.  

First known leader of men Coach Prime went kablooey on his own roster at Colorado.  He pretty much sent the players he inherited to the transfer portal while bringing in his own players.  This used to be known, in the not too distant past, as “cheating.”  It can also be considered as being unfair to some, if not all, of the “student-athletes” he cashiered on a wholesale basis.  

Which raises the question: Do they not have an athletic director over there?  

Then no sooner had the final whistle blown at the spring game when the Buffaloes announced they were exiting the PAC-12 to return to the Big -12 from whence they had fled some 10-15 years ago.  This gives me the opportunity to paraphrase the joke when Colorado went to the PAC-12:  The dope in the Big 12 just got a lot better.  And the Buffs will be joined in their new home by Arizona, Arizona State and Utah.  

Of course this was hot on the heels of USC and UCLA bolting to join the SEC Conference (as many fans and some coaches refer to it).  And not too long afterwards Oregon and Washington  hooked up with the Big 12 leaving Stanford and Cal (along with Washington State and Oregon State) to hold the bag in the now Little 4 formerly known mainly to itself as the “Conference of Champions.”  Supposedly Leland’s Farm and the Golden Bears are hiking their skirts at the ACC.  We’ll see.  Stanford hasn’t been very good at anything other than golf and tennis in sometime.  Cal is even worse and their athletic department is drowning in red ink.  Plus their respective alumni bases are pretty snooty.  Worse than Duke’s even.

Of course this makes no sense geographically.  I mean, Seattle to Piscataway is a long haul.  As has been pointed out while this may not be as big a deal to the football teams that play once a week, it will be pretty onerous to the other team sports that are supposed to play ball once or twice a week in some far off clime while keeping up with the books being “student-athletes” and all.  Is this fair to them?

Here’s the answer.  This is a football thing.  And the the powers that be in the Power 5 conferences and ESPN/Disney/FOX along with the old networks don’t much care about such picayune matters as travel arrangements for the swim team. Because let’s face it.  Football is a core function for many DI schools, much more important in the great scope of things than the music department.  And now some of the players are finally getting paid.  As in over the table.   

Professional sports.  And it’s all about football. Pure and simple.  

What’s next?  Here’s my guess and this guess was unthinkable to me just a week ago.  Do you think the media companies that are pumping out the money that prompted the kablooey would rather show, say, Tennessee and Vanderbilt or Oklahoma versus Tennessee?  Ohio State against Northwestern or Ohio State against UCLA?  

Could Vandy and Northwestern get kicked out of the SEC and the Big Ten?  After all, both were founding members of those two conferences.  What about tradition and shared history?  The answer may be “who cares?”  

Nothing would surprise me.  

If the ACC gives the cold shoulder to Cal and Stanford maybe Vanderbilt and Northwestern can join them in forming a new conference.

They could call it “The Smart Guys Plus 2 Others Conference.”

Nothing would surprise me.  

    

 

My Sunday Feeling

The Feds dropped the second shoe last week when it hit Donald John Trump with another Indictment, this one for attempting to overthrow an otherwise valid Presidential election that, as it happened, did not turn out well for him.  I do not have the actual charging document in front of me. But if memory serves it weighs in at @ 40 counts over 60 pages.  This means @70 counts in 2 Federal Judicial districts. And the State of Georgia has yet to weigh in on its problem with him.

Before we go a further, let me restate something that I wrote a month or so ago after the first go-around in Fort Pierce.  As little use as I have for Donald Trump, and my disdain for him is as wide as Mir a Lago’s coastal shelf, I cannot summon forth enough schadenfreude to fill a shot glass.

Because while I view Trump’s behavior that is lined out in the charging documents to be worthy of prosecution, let me reiterate that I dread the prospect of the actual trial of these matters. Mainly, because he cannot be controlled by any of his lawyers, any of the 72 or so he has on retainer, and I’m not so sure about the courts either.  

Consider this.  At plea and arraignment last Thursday the United States Magistrate Judge, as part of the normal recitation of conditions for release added that Defendant Trump is not to commit any crimes in any jurisdiction this side of the Papal Courts while he is ROR’d.  But she also told him that he is not to contact any witnesses without counsel being present.  And she ordered him not to contact any of the eventual jurors.  

Defendant Trump is a former President of the United States.  He swore upon his oath to faithfully execute the laws of the United States.  Now this.  I think your average mob boss gets more deference than DT was afforded Thursday.

This is remarkable. 

But most criminal defendants, especially those that are fairly notorious for whatever reason, are told to lay low.  Running for office while under indictment is the polar antithesis of “laying low.”  And Trump is not only basing his re-election bid on the Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen from both him and his acolytes, but that he is being persecuted by a “weaponized” Justice Department acting by and through Joe Biden.

Never mind that the indictments were brought in the name of the United States of America.  Never mind that they were handed up by Grand Juries consisting of his fellow citizens.  Never mind that they are both extremely fact intensive.  Never mind the fact that the Government is undoubtedly loaded for bear or these cases wouldn’t have gotten this far.

And so far, Trump has made it a match between good and evil.  Trump has actually gone so far as to have stated that he is being indicted for his base.

That’s a good one.  Donald Trump. Christ-figure of the Republican Primary.

And what if he pops off on social media while the trial is underway?  I can very easily see him complain about any rulings that go against him.  That puts a lot of pressure on a judge who at that point might be forced to consider whether to issue a gag order against a candidate for President.

But societal norms or a sense of shame or human dignity have never much mattered to Donald Trump.  Neither has consistency of thought.  Even at this late dates it sounds like he is still willing to say the first thing that pops into his head. And then deny that he ever said it.  (As an aside, this was written on Friday afternoon.  As I wrote this, Trump was popping off on social media about going after his persecutors.  DOJ has brought this to the Court’s attention.  The Judge wants a response from his attorneys by Monday.  Here we go.)

And this is the man that, most likely, will be the GOP standard bearer in the general election.

The GOP.  The party that once stood for law and order.

God help us.

My Sunday Feeling

 It is Saturday afternoon as I put down this deathless prose.  I don’t fool with this blog like I used to.  Maybe it’s the heat.  Maybe it’s because I am lazy.  Maybe it is because when I started this I did it to relieve stress from work which is a stress I no longer have. But here I am making another cameo appearance.

Anyway, it is a Saturday afternoon and the Deacon and I are going to see “Barbie.” We’re going to a matinee.  I prefer matinees mainly because you get out at supper time and for me half the fun of going to the movies is talking about what you and your companion have seen over an adult beverage as you peruse the menu.

Secondly, “Barbie” has offended the sensibilities of- as far as I can tell-pretty much the same strata of people that are offended by the children’s fare (or what they perceive to be the children’s fare) at any public library around here.  I figure that I am less likely to get gunned down in broad daylight in a mass shooting by a triggered angry white guy who has got it in for, in this case, women.  That’s another reason I like the matinee for some movies.

I don’t get the mostly faux outrage over “Barbie.”  As I have gleaned from the reviews I have read “Barbie” is a send up of her idealized female form brought to life by a perfectly cast Margot Robbie who is not only beautiful but can do physical comedy as well as anybody.  It is a send up of the suits at Mattel along with the concept of male patriarchy.  As if that weren’t enough Ryan Gosling’s Ken supposedly manages to steal the movie.

Sounds like great fun to me.

Not so much to some folks.  I noticed a post on social media the other day bemoaning the fact that “Barbie” was not a fun innocent movie that she could take her kid to and was yet another sign that this country is going to Hell in a bucket.  And as for her she wasn’t going.

Good for her.  Don’t go.  That is her right.  To spend her money, or not spend her money, anywhere she damn well pleases for whatever reason suits her.  And to her everlasting credit, unlike some of the fools that are raising Cain about the libraries, she is not urging that the movie be banned. At least she didn’t in her post. God Bless.

And she probably shouldn’t take her daughter anyway.  I haven’t seen that “Barbie” has any sex in it (a lack of boy and girl parts would preclude such activity in any event) and there’s very little cussing.  At least nothing most kids haven’t heard already.  But it deals with provocative, adult themes.  Even though its protagonist is based on a beloved doll played with by millions of little girls it is not a children’s movie.  

Or at least that is what I’ve read.  

I guess the thing that mildly irritates me about people that oppose movies like “Barbie” on moral grounds (for lack of a better phrase) is the negative pregnant in much of that criticism that anybody that goes to see movies such as “Barbie” are themselves immoral.  Or worse giving into “woke” culture whatever that means.  That’s ridiculous.  

Me? I’m irredeemable. But without being a pain in the ass about it, my spouse is a moral and upright person who has raised the Hell out of a daughter.  She also would not take a swing at anybody who might accuse her of being a feminist.  Like Me the Irredeemable, she has an open mind, is not put off by different ideas and so, wants to get a look at this particular picture show to see what the fuss is all about.  

Besides it will be cool and dark inside the movie house.  What better way to pass a 102 degree afternoon?   

And afterwards we will discuss what we saw over a glass of wine for her and my Saturday night martini somewhere.  

I mean for God’s sake.  What is wrong with some people?

It’s just a movie.  

My Sunday Feeling

Just when you think that you no longer have the capacity to be surprised by anything that happens in DI athletics, you get unpleasantly surprised. 

I suppose that I have been to Evanston, Illinois 3 or 4 times.  I like Evanston.    Think of a larger version of Hillcrest with a major university in the middle of it.  I could live in Evanston but for the property values and the taxes.  Maybe I could live there under the statue of Civil War general Phil Sheridan for whom main drag Sheridan Road is named.  But I couldn’t afford to buy any real estate there.

Speaking of said major university, I’ve been on campus at Northwestern on most of the occasions I have been in the Chicago area.  Beautiful campus.  I’ve seen the Northwestern Wildcats play there in Ryan Stadium.  I saw them the year they went to the Rose Bowl of all damn things.  They were led by a couple of All-Americans: running back Darnell Autrey and a local boy linebacker Pat Fitzgerald.  After his playing days Fitz joined the Wildcat staff and eventually took over as head man when Randy Walker unexpectedly dropped dead from a massive coronary.  

In his 16 years on the job Fitz wrung a .500 record out of a team once derisively known as the “Mildcats.”  Along the way, he took them to 10 bowl games including another Rose Bowl.  It was widely thought that Fitz had them playing as well as they ever could play given the fact that Northwestern ain’t that easy to get into, being an “academic school” as Wally Hall might say, or has said in regards to Vanderbilt and Rice, and that they play in the Big Ten. Or 15. Or whatever they are now with the addition of perennial Midwestern powerhouses USC and UCLA.  

Well, Pat Fitzgerald got canned the other day after the student newspaper, the Daily Northwestern, printed a story in which former players complained of acts of hazing in the football locker room.  Really grim stuff.  Serial “dry-humping” of a victim in a darkened room.  Nude quarterbacks being forced to take snaps from an equally disrobed center.  And that’s all I can remember.  Or care to. 

Fitzgerald says he knew nothing about this stuff.  Some of the victims said he had to know about it.  Anyway as the story got worse and worse, the two week suspension originally laid down was ripened to a termination, the university’s position being it was his job to know what was going on.

Still you don’t think of this stuff going on at a world class academic institution like Northwestern. Then again, you didn’t think of little boys getting molested by a member of the coaching staff at Penn State either.  

And it makes me wonder.  If this kind of brutality was going on at an Ivy League level institution like Northwestern, you wonder where else it could be happening?  

I guarantee you that college presidents nationwide broke out in cold sweats when this news got out.  And I also guarantee you that ADs are being instructed to get the word out to their coaches reminding them that there is zero tolerance for hazing of any kind.  

Because if hazing could erupt behind closed doors at Northwestern it can be, and most likely is, happening elsewhere.

And it cannot be tolerated.  

But stay tuned.  I bet we haven’t heard the last of this issue.

  

 

My Sunday Feeling

    Thursday was one of those days that a person tends to remember forever.  I know I will.  Thursday was the day that a former President of the United States, namely Donald Trump, was indicted by a Grand Jury in Florida of committing crimes against those United States.  The 37 count indictment set out in 49 pages basically accuses Trump of being in possession of classified materials to which he was not entitled once he left office and of obstructing justice while trying to keep them out of the hands of the FBI and the National Archives.  His so called “body man”, a gentleman named Nauta was also indicted, for lying to the FBI.

    Let me state at this point that I do not feel any particular happiness at this turn of events, no schadenfreude, no satisfaction even though I have no particular use for Donald Trump.  The indictment of any elected official, or former elected official, is a sad and terrible thing.  The indictment of a former President is almost unthinkable.  It would certainly have been unthinkable to Thomas Jefferson who hoped and believed that the occupant of the highest office in the land would be a man of unimpeachable ( forgive me) integrity and character.  

    While we all believe that “no man is above the law” and that every one of us is entitled to a speedy trial and to the presumption of innocence, I dread the prospect of the days to come even before we get to the trial of this matter.  Which, being in Federal Court, mercifully will not be televised.  Anyway, Donald Trump summoned the mob to keep the Congress from certifying the results of the election that he most assuredly lost.  Do you think he won’t do it again to stay out of prison?  Not that I think he would be sentenced to prison if he were convicted.  But you get the larger point.

    Indeed, one Congressman from Louisiana has tweeted what more than one person has interpreted to be a call for some sort of military action next Tuesday at the Courthouse when Trump makes his first appearance before a Judge. And this is just Plea and Arraignment.  The next year will be bumpy indeed.  

    I have read the indictment a couple of times.  I was struck by how the allegations are tied to documents, photographs, text messages ( talk about fools) and notes.  Not to the testimony of a snitch somewhere in the darkness although I’m sure Mr. Nauta will have every opportunity to talk to the authorities if and when he feels so led. 

    Secondly, I was struck by the proprietary nature of Trump’s relationship to documents he had no more authorization to possess than I do.  The indictment is replete with references to him referring to the boxes containing the classified documents as “my boxes.”   What gave him that idea?  One commentator said something along the lines of it’s like Trump saying he was entitled to remove the portrait of George Washington when he left the Oval Office. 

    This makes no sense.  All he had to do was give the damn boxes back and we wouldn’t be at this terrible juncture in American history.  How ego driven.  How-dare I say it?-childish.

    Trumps supporters have not addressed the gravamen of the Indictment.  Rather, they are attacking the prosecutor, Joe Biden and the Department of Justice.  That ain’t gonna cut when it comes down to brass tacks.  And Trumps lawyers know it.

    A deceased buddy of mine over in east Arkansas had a client once who was the recipient of a similarly robust multi-count indictment.  He urged his client to consider letting him approach the Feds to see about making a deal.  

    “Because boy,” he told his client. “Ya know ya done at least one of em.”

    When, not if, they get to the facts of this case Donald J. Trump will be in a pickle.

    Because he was charged with 37 counts.  He done at least one of em.   

  

   

My Sunday Feeling

We have recent proof that there is no issue the gelatinous Ted Cruz will not demogogue.  Having evidently grown weary of pimping for Dr. Seuss, he has turned his sights, along with fellow Republican Senator Marsha Blackburn, to the burning pseudo controversy concerning trans “influencer” (whatever that means) Dylan Mulvaney, whom Anheuser-Busch adopted as a front person for Bud Light.     

At this point let me state that I am damn near 100% impervious to advertising, via whatever media.  There is no advertising, save for the exceedingly rare public service spot, that can create a "need" in me to spend money.  Now if I'm in the market for, say, golf shoes and I see that a golf store is running a sale on golf shoes, well that's useful information and I will go check it out.  Similarly speaking, I have a friend who drives a Buick which he recommends highly.  If I decide to get a new car I may check out Buicks. And I may visit the dealer in Bryant, Arkansas.  Not because i enjoy her stupid TV ads.  On the contrary, I find them annoying.  Especially the one with the kids in it.  But I will check out Everett Buick-GMC because I've never heard anything all that bad about them and I know for a fact that Suzie Everett gives a lot of money back to her community.  That doesn’t mean I’ll buy a car from her.  But I might be inclined to check her out.

People like me are in the minority.  They don't teach advertising and marketing in college because the industries are going broke.  

But this is why I never heard of Dylan Mulvaney until just the the other day when Kid Rock dropped a video of the beloved entertainer shooting up cans of Bud Light in protest.  I don't pay attention to ads and I don’t do Instagram.  So that was my first knowledge of the national crisis.

Anyway, Cruz and Blackburn have written something called the Beer Institute (who knew?) asking them to launch an investigation into Bud Light's advertising practices.  The theory is that the ads featuring Mulroney were an improper inducement to underage people.  They didn't accuse Bud Light of (Buzz word alert!) "grooming" but they probably wanted to.

What's going on here is neither sinister nor terribly complicated.  From what I read Bud Light wanted to expand its market beyond the caucasian frat boys and rednecks that traditionally buy that product.  Boy did they.  (Full disclosure.  I buy Bud Light.  I’m not making a statement other than keeping Joe out of what’s left of the Dixie.)      

I wonder if Cruz knows that Subaru pitched their cars almost exclusively to lesbians in the Eighties and Nineties.  (Another full disclosure.  I drive a Subaru.  But not for that reason.  I am not a lesbian. NOT THAT THERE'S ANYTHING WRONG WITH THAT.) 

In doing what little research I did for this post, I've learned that all of the carmakers are in serious competition for the LGBTQ buck.  Because gay folks buy cars!  Just as trans folk evidently buy beer.  And if Bud Light doesn't sell it to them, Miller Light will.    

Bidness is bidness.

Seeing as how the current head of The Beer Institute is the CEO at Anheuser- Busch, my guess is that Cruz and Blackburn will get told to pound sand.  And that will be that until the next manufactured controversy. 

So my advice to Ted is to sit back, chill out and to pound a couple of Bud LIghts along with that sand.  Maybe turn on an Astros game.  Just don't pay too much attention to the commercial interruptions.

Those advertisers are trying to sell stuff to anybody with a buck to spend.  Be they gay trans or whatever.  

Bidness is bidness.

My Sunday Feeling

 God knows the City of Little Rock has got its fair share of problems.  Many of those problems have been recounted in this space.  And because I am weary of them, along with this cold I am fighting off, I do not care to re-allege all of the things I have been bitching about the past three years or so.  Rather, I choose to accentuate the positive today.

I spent Thursday afternoon at the new Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts (née Arkansas Arts Center) at McArthur Park.  Oh. My. God.  While I had long admired the superstructure as it was going up over the last 4 years I was not prepared for what awaited me inside.

But first some background. I have fond memories of the old AAC.  It was borne initially by a committee of busy body social doyennes, which is how social and artistic progress used to get kick-started around these parts, called the Fine Arts Club.  This was around 1915.  It eventually morphed into the AAC in the sixties.  Its museum and studios have graced MacArthur Park downtown since those days.

The museum underwent something of a renovation about the time I got back from law school @ 1982 or so.  But the old girl still pretty much looked that the same place, only dumpier, I knew in high school.  I last set foot in the AAC around 2016 with my then girlfriend to see the Annual Delta art exhibit.  Great exhibit.  Mediocre surroundings.

Mediocre no more. Boy would the old gals from the Fine Arts Club be surprised.  

I do not have an artistic bone in my body.  I completely unqualified to write about these matters.  So here goes nothing.

But the AMFA is simply stunning.  The word space kept coming to my mind as I walked through the new building.  The exhibit halls are huge and what contributes to this sense of space is the numerous floor to ceiling windows throughout the museum.  I will have to go back soon to take a harder look at the artwork on the walls and floors.  I was too busy admiring the building.

And it occurred to me-duh-that the structure itself is to be regarded as a piece of art in and of itself.  Nobody ever said that about the old AAC.

There is a large sitting room/coffee shop.  I enjoyed sitting there and looking at the surrounding neighborhood through the huge windows.  And guess what?  There is a real restaurant.  With a wet bar.  Too bad Winthrop Rockefeller-who helped raise money for the old AAC- isn’t around to see this.  I’m guessing he would approve.  

To say that I was floored is to understate the case considerably.  Of course I am a member and I look forward to spending many happy hours there with that former girlfriend who has since become my wife.  Maybe we can drag the kids along as well.  

The new AMFA is proof that the City of Little Rock can get involved with something and not screw it up completely.  For once.

Now can we please bring back golf to War Memorial Park?  

My Sunday Feeling

As most everyone knows by now, Dominion Voting Systems settled its libel suit against Fox News last week.  Check that.  Make that most everyone that that gets their news content from virtually anybody other than Fox.  Because I’m guessing that none of the fair-minded journalists over there have mentioned a peep of this to their viewers.  Fox tends to eke out facts-or “true facts” as folks around here say- on damn near a “need to know” basis. And its audience doesn’t need to know much.  

Anyway, many people both inside and outside of the straight up media expressed some measure of disappointment at this outcome.  The Judge had ruled earlier that the stuff Fox put out about Dominion’s machines allowing the 2020 Presidential election to get stolen was not just false but “clearly false.”  All Dominion had to do was prove that the false claims made by Fox were made with “actual malice” or “in reckless disregard for the truth.”  

Generally, as I understand it, this last prong of the test is hard to prove.  However, Dominion’s lawyers had access to a trove of emails from not only Fox talking heads like the odious Tucker Carlson, certain producers and Rupert Murdoch himself in which doubts were expressed about the truth of the crap that they were putting out for their rabid customers. 

Which brings me to this quick aside.  It has never been particularly clear to me just who the hell was supposed to have been behind the grand heist of 2020.  Biden?  Hillary?  The Chinese?  The Arkansas Conference of the United Methodist Church? Hunter Biden? The Scientologists?  

Did Dominion’s machines acquire sentience and flip their own switches against Donald Trump?

Every theft requires a thief.  Maybe it’s just big dumb me (as Uncle Howard used to put it) but I never could quite suss out who the mastermind behind all this supposedly was.  

But I ramble.  

As I alluded to earlier, many folks were disappointed that the case didn’t go to trial.  I admit the prospect of Sean Hannity and Carlson being forced to testify under oath was pleasing to even me.  

But you know what?  Dominion and its crackerjack legal team (and it must be said that both sides were ably represented) are not obligated to litigate for our amusement.  They sued for 1.6 billion.  They settled for $787.5 million.  Which ain’t bad when you consider that Dominion was worth-at the time it filed the lawsuit-@ 50 million. 

Besides, Fox isn’t out of the woods yet.  Another manufacturer of voting machines-Smartmatic-is suing it for 2.7 billion.  Smartmatic says it’s not settling.    

And Dominion has other cases pending against such luminaries as Mike Lindell (the money burning “My Pillow” guy) and Rudy Giuliani.  The prospects for amusement remain high.  And now Dominion has got a pretty fat litigation fund to play with going forward.  

But no.  The lawyers for Dominion did one hell of a job.  It was a good settlement.

It just wasn’t very much fun to watch.  And it remains to be seen whether having to cough up over the lies of 2020 will operate as a deterrent to Fox going forward.  

Probably not.  It will just pick different shots from now until 2024.  Like trans kids and bathrooms.  Trump’s various legal problems.  Hunter Biden’s laptop. Kids having access to porn at the local library.  Subjects its gullible audience will continue to eat with a spoon but are pretty risk free from a litigation perspective. 

After all, the show must go on.      

My Sunday Feeling

 A 32 year old teacher at Bryant High school turned herself in to the Saline County Sheriff yesterday.  Make that former teacher.  She was charged with sexual assault on a minor in the first degree.  The story is that she had improper relations a male student.  A football player.

I am by no stretch of the imagination a perfect man.  I’m not even a particularly good man.  There are even some criminal acts I can understand.  Stealing I understand.  Selling drugs I understand.  Thefts of property I understand.  And not only do I understand most white collar crimes  I could probably perform some of them if I put my head to it.  While I understand in general doing crimes that doesn’t mean that I would do them.  

And not because my morals are in such fine tune.  I can’t do time.  Not only that I can’t lose my license to practice law.  I have no other useful skills other than the ability to sing.  And you how many singers are waiting tables?  

What I do not understand for the life of me are crimes involving children.  Not for one minute do I understand it.  The depth of this feeling struck really home with me years ago when I was administering a test over at Mount Saint Mary Academy which is a Catholic High School for girls down the street from here.  The girls were sprawled all over the classroom.  Sitting or lying in the floor.  Some actually sat at their desks.  

And it occurred to me as watched these kids take the test that one would need to have many screws loose in the headgear to want to have a sexual relationship-forget romance-with a minor. Even seniors in high school are still basically children.  What sane person would have that kind of desire? 

And if there’s a higher degree of “I do not for the life of me understand” it is reserved for adult females who carry on with boys. I used to be a boy.  I can’t imagine any adult women during that era wanting to have the first damn thing to do with me.  Hell, most girls my speed sensibly had no interest in me.

Having said that, I would be remiss if I didn’t remind myself and Gentle Reader that the former teacher is entitled to the presumption of innocence until such time as she is not.  But what kind of a damn fool gets herself or himself into this kind of fix?

I swear to God.  I just do not understand it.

                                                 *********************************

This has been the spring for violent weather.  Another thunderstorm blew through about 6 last night bringing torrential rains, winds and hail.  Our power has been out since then.  Entergy has sent me an email adding me to “don’t worry” because help is on the scene.  That was about 30 minutes ago.  

I can’t complain.  My house is still standing and I have places to go to charge up my devices if I need to.  Yesterday I drove past the Walnut Valley subdivision that was directly in the crosshairs of the twister that blew through Little Rock en route to the Delta a couple of weeks ago.  

God almighty.  The neighborhood looked like a bomb got dropped on it.  Never have I seen such devastation with my own two eyes live and in person.  It will take those poor folks forever to rebuild.  

Me?  I got no complaints.  The power will come back on and coffee shops in the neighborhood are open.  At least as far as I know.  

But I am really over the spring of 2023.

Stay safe.  There could be more to come.  

My Sunday Post Apocalypse Feeling

These are truly amazing times.  Former President Donald Trump was indicted Thursday by a grand jury in New York State.  The Indictment that was handed up supposedly contains 34 counts.  Given who we know has testified, the grand jury was empaneled to explore whether moneys paid to the beloved entertainer Stormy Daniels in exchange for her silence about an alleged affair she had with Trump ran afoul of New York’s business record laws and by extension Federal campaign funding laws.

The State’s theory, as I understand it, is that Donald Trump, then running for President against Hillary Clinton in a tight race, funneled money through the Trump Organization to his then lawyer Micheal Cohen to repay Cohen for fronting the hush money to Daniels.  The payments to Cohen were carried on the Trump Organization’s books as legal fees paid to him.  This mischaracterization on the books is allegedly a colorable violation of the said business laws.  The other theory, which has caused commentators on both sides of the spectrum to scratch their heads, is that payments to Stormy were made so that they would not become an issue in the campaign, thus making them an illegal campaign contribution that was never disclosed until after the election.

Trump, for his part, denies that he carried on with Stormy.  Which he really needs to do seeing as how his wife Melania had recently given birth to their son Barron.  Not only was such alleged horsing around on his part during this time unseemly in the extreme, there is the part to keep in mind about Hell having no such fury and all that.  

He just thinks two other grand juries getting up his hindquarters with flashlights are his problem after Stormy takes the stand.  Which I assume she will do.  He better have an iron clad “pre-nup.” If there is such a thing under these tawdry circumstances.    

I know a lot of people who are delighted by this turn of events, by the indictment.  The emotions seem to run the gamut between plain old schadenfreude and a feeling of “He’s finally getting his just rewards” and that “Justice is being served.”

Just like lawyers everywhere, lay people have been asking me what I think.  As an attorney and officer of the court, I feel compelled to throw cold water on any expressions of jubilance that I hear.  Here’s why.

Like it or not, Donald Trump is entitled to the same presumption of innocence as you and I.  Secondly, I have no particular problem with believing that Trump and his associates cooked up a way to get money to Stormy in exchange for her silence. What guilty spouse wouldn’t try to keep this safely under the rug if he or she could?  If that’s a violation of NY record keeping laws so be it.  What I’m less comfortable with is viewing this scheme and device (as the Indictment will undoubtedly say) as a violation of Federal campaign finance laws.

Why is this important?  Because while the Statute of Limitations for the campaign laws stuff is 10 years, the state charges only carry a 2 year SOL.  Accordingly, if there’s no violation of Federal law, the case goes away.  You can bet that the lawyers for both sides have researched this issue to a fare-the-well.  We shall see what we shall see.  

So let’s not get carried away just yet.  If ever.

Secondly, should the State get around the Motion to Dismiss that will most assuredly be filed, trial of this matter will be an absolute nightmare.  There will be protests and counter-protests.  Courtroom security will be Uber-jumpy.  The poor jurors will most certainly have to be sequestered for their own protection.  And if a guilty verdict is returned you can expect riots in the streets.  

This will be a terrible experience for our country and I do not look forward to it.  Trump has summoned the mob once.  He will do it again.  If he hasn’t done so already.

And yet, and yet, the rule of law must prevail.  Guilty or not guilty the process must play out with out fear or favor and without intimidation.  

I will undoubtedly write more about this, apart from the attempted insurrection on January 6, 2021, being the most seminal event of my life.  And there may be more to come out of Georgia and DC.  

What an amazing time.

                                                 *************************

Since writing the above post Little Rock was hit by a monster tornado last Friday afternoon.  Tornadoes around here are nothing new, God knows.  But usually they are small and hop around.  This SOB was more like a hurricane in that it was huge and stayed on the land for a straight line from Little Rock to the delta.  

Our house and surrounding neighborhood are fine even though the damn thing crossed the river about two miles from us.  Way too close for comfort.

Much of west Little Rock looks like a bomb went off.  No telling how long it will take to restore power, remove debris and return folks to some semblance of normalcy.  So far, the death toll seems remarkably small.  So far.  

The Deacon and I are beyond lucky and are likewise grateful.  And we are equally grateful that none of our people died or have suffered grievous injury.  At least not that we know of.

Please keep those who were not so fortunate in your thoughts and prayers.  

  

 

 

My Sunday Feeling

 As I have said before, I used to hang around in Jackson, Mississippi.  Had friends there, had occasional work there.  Met a girl there and we had this long distance thing going before it eventually went the way of all long distance things.  Or most of them anyway.

Jackson was a nice place in those days some 25 years ago.  Probably would not have taken too much for me to have moved there.

Thank God I did not.

My late law school classmate Hugh and his then wife lived in a country club neighborhood.  Hugh and I played many rounds of golf over at Colonial Country Club.  Pretty nice track.  Nothing great.  But pretty nice.  Hugh told me back then that the club was struggling financially.  It was having trouble retaining members and/or attracting new ones.  

Just like Jackson/Hinds County itself.  The Jackson metro area started experiencing membership retention issues (amongst the white members primarily) about that time.  Anyway, poor Hugh up and died in 2011.  Laura, his widow, sold the house and moved away about the time that the Colonial Country Club was being foreclosed on.  

As I recall, the property was bid in at foreclosure by a real estate developer who had great plans for the property as real estate developers tend to have.  The first plan was to bring in a golf course designer and revive the old course.  That didn’t work. The second plan was subdivide it and sell high end houses and rent high end apartments.  The property would be anchored by a shopping center.  

An apartment complex was built out there.  One of my friends that has remained in the area there says it is her understanding that the remaining property has pretty much gone to waste and is completely grown over. 

At this point Gentle Reader would be forgiven if s/he was wondering just where the heck I was going with this.  

Perhaps you have heard about Jackson’s water woes. I will not recount them here.  But last week they ran a story about a burst pipe that is spewing 60 million gallons of water a day.  A DAY.  And has for years.  Like since 2015. Now there is a Jim dandy sinkhole around the breach and a resultant pond about the size of a swimming pool.  

The area around the leak, if you want to refer to a 60 million gallon day geyser as a “leak” is guess where?  The old Colonial Country Club golf course.  

As best as I can tell it’s out around #4 on the old course/nature preserve.  

If you need a metaphor for incompetent city government you may look no further.

God knows the City of LIttle Rock is hardly a well oiled engine.  But it ain’t Jackson.

For example here are 2 small recent examples of what is like to live somewhere that is not a complete banana republic.  The city is repaving Kavanaugh Boulevard down below my house.  Kavanaugh is a major artery in town.  This job has been a major pain in the ass, with the smell of tar everywhere, closed off lanes and huge equipment blocking the road.  But guess what?  That’s planned maintenance.  They do not do that in Jackson.

Secondly, we lost power Friday night as a hot storm blew through. We reported the outage and the lights came on 2 hours later.  I cannot complain.  I would have no room to complain had they still been out Saturday morning seeing as how this storm was the same one that was to blow Rolling Fork, Mississippi off the map around 2 am that day.  We were merely inconvenienced.  We were lucky.

I don’t mean to suggest that Little Rock is Berlin.  But Little Rock basically works.  

And even when you consider the unused green space off Fair Park Boulevard that used to be a beloved golf course and is now mainly a monument to Frank Scott’s arrogance and hubris, you have to give him one thing.

It hasn’t leaked millions of gallons of water for damn near 10 years.  And Little Rock ain’t Jackson.

My Sunday Feeling

 “There are very few Lex Luthors out there.”

This is a quote from a friend of mine who is a Judge around these parts.  I forget the context in which it came up.  But it was at least a couple of weeks before Alex Murdaugh took the stand, allegedly in his defense,  in the double homicide case brought against him by the state of South Carolina.  

I thought of the Judge’s maxim as Murdaugh, his alibi blown to smithereens, proceeded to lie his way straight into 2 life sentences in the South Carolina state pen, a destination which will no doubt require an adjustment on his part, having lived a life of riches (or more accurately an abundant line of credit) and privilege up until this point in time.  To be fair, he has already gotten a taste of his new lifestyle, having spent the last year behind bars awaiting his trial date. But you get my larger point.  Murdaugh doesn’t fit the usual profile of a guy in the joint.  Which may make his tenure there somewhat problematic.

It must really suck to be him now.  Two consecutive life sentences.  That first sentence could end next week if he runs across the right con in the exercise yard.  That second one will be a bitch to serve.

But, to paraphrase something my dad used to tell me, he has only himself to blame.

I assume, gentle reader, that you are basically conversant with the facts.  Forget about the lying for a minute.  Here’s how fucked up all this is.  As I told the Deacon around Wednesday of last week, “Sure he is  a liar and a thief who was about to get exposed to the world as such during discovery in his son’s wrongful death case.  So he blows his wife and Paul to Kingdom Come to buy him time to come up with some money?  That makes no sense.”

His able defense attorney, who did a pretty good job of spinning straw into gold, even threw that one out there for the jury to consider.  Why would Murdaugh  do that?  It makes no sense.

And yet that is what he did.  When confronted with a money problem, albeit a pretty stiff one, he blew away Mags and Paw-Paw.

There once was a time where there very much was a Gothic South.  A South where the likes of Faulkner, Miss Eudora, Williams and McCullars walked alongside the authors of the King James Bible.  In that world, certain families pretty much ran things in their particular locales.  Arkansas really didn’t have many  cities or counties that were “ran” by a person or family.  Sheriff Marlin Hawkins in Conway County comes to mind along with Robert E. Lee Wilson of Wilson, Arkansas.  

One of my buddies and I were discussing this the other day.  I think it would be harder to be “the boss” of a county or city now.  In the first place, and boy did Murdaugh discover this to his torment, there’s too many cameras, too many tracking devices, out there even in the country.  (Note to self: Before attempting a major crime turn off On-Star.).  Secondly most of the old cracker types that used to populate the rural south, the ones that Faulkner knew so well, have died off and their offspring have left.

Still, as was pointed out to a fare-the-well by the media last week, Alex Murdaugh came from a long line of lawyers, judges and prosecutors in the low country judicial district that eventually put him in the dock.  No doubt, the Murdaughs historically have cut a lot of ice in Colleton County.  And yet, in an interview with the former US Attorney for the District of South Carolina during the Obama Administration, he implored the media to quit referring to the Murdaughs as “prominent.” He basically said that they were nobody outside of Colleton. 

Still it’s a long way from the yacht club and Gamecocks baseball to getting away with murder.  Are narcissism, privilege and a“big fish in small pond”sense of historical entitlement sufficient to make a good ole boy like Alex Murdaugh into a master criminal, at least in his own mind?  Who thinks like this?

I’m with his lawyer.  It makes no sense.  

But it proves the Judge’s maxim in spades.  

Because Alex Murdaugh sure as hell ain’t no Lex Luthor.    

 

 

  

My Sunday Feeling

 Some time ago, 60 Minutes did a piece on the great English actor Micheal Caine.  In the story, they asked Caine, who is no spring chicken (and wasn’t then either) what it was like to be older.  He said something to the effect that it was pretty sad for him because most of his friends were gone.  

It is Lent.  And I can relate.  I still have most of my friends.  But people that I was close to are starting to leave.  The last two and half years have been brutal.  My brother Dave was found dead in his bed up in Missouri.  My Uncle Howard died at the ripe old age of 90.  My cousin Rebecca laid down for a nap at her sister’s house and never got up.  And least week my pastor and friend Vic Nixon died.  Vic married me and buried my mother.  You don’t get much more connected up than that.

And one of my friends has gone the way of full blown psychosis.  He might as well be dead to me.  He, like the dear souls listed above, is most assuredly on another shore.  And I can’t bring him back from there either.

Hey look.  I’m pushing 70.  I’m just a beer-truck-blowing-a-red-light away from joining the Choir Invisible.  Most likely my bad genes will catch up to me and I will go the traditional family route to the Pearly Gates via cardiac disease.  So far so good though.  Or something crazy could happen to me.  Something crazy like I could get shot in the back of the head by a swindling close relative while fooling around at a dog pen.  Then again, I don’t plan on moving to South Carolina anytime soon. Like ever. 

What does Lent have to do with these ruminations?  Not much I guess other than it is never a completely bad thing to be cognizant of the fact that we live in the temporal and that tomorrow is not guaranteed to any of us.  

It is traditional, primarily in Catholic and Orthodox Christianity, to “give up” something during these 45 days of Lent.  Catholics are forbidden to eat meat on Fridays during the Pentential Season.  The Deacon has that one covered as she is vegan. I know folks that are giving up coffee and alcohol.  That’s two I’ve heard about this season.

Protestants don’t make such a big deal out of Lenten abstinence .  When I was a kid I used to give up sweets although Mother didn’t really let us have much in the way of candy back in the day.  Maybe that’s why I don’t have much of a sweet tooth to this day.  Speaking of Vic, he liked his wine.  He told me he always gave it up for Lent, if only to make sure he wasn’t hooked on it.  And of course, he wasn’t.

What about me?  How am I gonna observe Lent?  This is what I told the boys in the Theology Club at school.  I am going to observe Lent by doubling down on my Legal Aid stuff during the period.  And I’m going to give more money to homeless charities and civil liberties organizations.  That has more significance to me than giving up coffee or cussing for 45 days.  By the way, I’ve tried the latter.  Epic fail.  

Oh well.  I am only human am I not?

There’s something else I’m going to do.  I’m going to try to reach out to folks I haven’t talked to in awhile.  Haven’t quite figured out exactly who they will be yet.  And there’s a damn good reason why I haven’t reached out to some folks.  But a lot of the time we fall away from others just because we do.  Work, family, other obligations get in the way.  It happens.

I’m hardly one to hold myself out as a model for right living and I don’t really give unsolicited advice.  But there’s bound to be someone in your life that you haven’t talked to in awhile for no reason other than inertia.  

Reach out to one of those folks during this Lent. Some of them might be gone sooner than later to a distant shore where you can’t get them back. Hell you might be gone soon.  I might be gone.  None of us are guaranteed tomorrow.

Ask Michael Caine.  

  

My Sunday Feeling

 The sun is making a cameo appearance in the sky again as I type this.  It is good to see it again.  In case you haven’t heard, we had 3 consecutive ice storms smite the Central Arkansas area in the last 3 days.  

Ice is the worst.  With snow you can at least get around and occasionally drive.  It is not advisable on the hilly street the Deacon and I live on.  But you can do it.  Not so with ice.  I looked out on the skating rink in my back yard and visions of hip fractures danced in my head. 

All you can do under the circumstances is to stock up on provisions, resign yourself to camping out indoors until the “weather event” ends and hope that the power stays on.  We had coffee, food, booze and internet access.  Could be worse.  And for a lot of poor souls it IS worse.  God help them and the social agencies that provide food and warm shelter to those that are without.  Their’s is a mighty work indeed.  

Still, despite the fact that we wanted for nothing, this 3-4 day period of isolation felt oddly familiar.  And not in a good way.  I remember autumn 3 years ago.  The world as most Americans knew it had shut down.  Joe came home from college.  Melissa quit teaching in person.  She, Joe and all of my teacher buddies became acquainted-or better acquainted-with Google classroom and/or Zoom.  

Deja vu all over again. Only this time without kids. Consider.  Most of us were stuck once again in our homes.  Melissa was back to teaching occupational therapy online which has got to be damned difficult to do while I tried to stay out of the way.  I received texts from my teacher friends, mostly during their prep periods.  Just like 3 years ago none of us had anybody to talk to except each other.  And mostly by text.

The heating system here even went out again briefly and then revived itself some 3 hours later.  It has worked fine ever since. Only this time unlike 3 years ago I didn’t pay a repair man to stand in the driveway and say “Man. That’s strange” as my stepdaughter was yelling “The heater just came on!” from the front porch.  This go-around I accepted it on faith that the damn thing would kick back on.  And for once my faith was rewarded.  And I didn’t have to write anybody a check.

The last few days being cooped up in the house brought back terrible memories of a terrible time when COVID was a death sentence.  Scientists were racing to find a vaccine while idiots and charlatans foolishly hawked quack cures like Ivermectin and household disinfectants.  One of that number happened to be the President of the United States.  Truly that was a horrible time that will live in infamy upon history’s immortal scroll.

We should never forget just what a terrible time the pandemic was.  It touched virtually every segment of our society and we are just now getting up on our feet.  Just in time for a handful of fools in the House to threaten to cause a default on the sovereign debt of the United States by refusing to raise the debt ceiling to pay for bills already appropriated by-guess who?-the damn Congress.

But there is nothing I can do about it other than to accept on faith-since I seem to be doing that more lately-some common sense will kick in on its own up there on the Hill.  But I know what I can and will do.  I’m going to write a check for a homeless ministry instead to a heating and air company.    

That’s what I can do.  And I can be glad that spring, and baseball, is not all that far away.  

My Sunday Feeling

 It took a couple of weeks longer than it should have.  But a couple of comedians finally took on Congressman George Santos (R-NY), he of the fluid sexual orientation and vocational history.  And imaginative accounting skills.    

SNL inexplicably put Bowen Yang as Santos on the fictional sidelines of an NFL game where he eventually appeared in drag, as Santos himself is alleged to have done during his salad days back in Brazil when his income is alleged to have consisted mainly of petty theft.  Next up on the Tonight show was the usually reliable Jon Lovitz who portrayed Santos as informed by his classic character, pathological liar Tommy Flanagan.  

You know what?  Neither performance was particularly funny.  Even Santos himself complained about them.  Indeed, I found SNL’s “NFL Today” parody the writers contrived to get Mr. Yang’s character on the sideline to be particularly unamusing.  

And I wondered, why didn’t these performers hit home runs?  Granted Mr. Yang’s oeuvre has always been a little “out there” for my tastes.  But I’ve always enjoyed the work of Jon Lovitz.  And after all you would think that a guy like Santos would pretty much write his own copy.  

Then it occurred to me.  Some people are beyond parody.  

Consider what parody of a person is.  It is when you take a sample from a person’s being-typically a person that is otherwise admired-an exaggerate it for laughs.  Think of recent Presidents.  Reagan and W typically have been portrayed as amiable boobs.  Obama as a diffident snob.  Clinton as, well, a horndog while his wife was portrayed in a pantsuit with a belly laugh that could shatter glass.  Trump with yellow hair and surrounded by lunatics. I don’t think they’ve quite figured Biden out yet.  Portraying him as burdened with a walker would be cruel.  And effective parody isn’t cruelty.  So you get the idea.

But the problem with trying to do a parody of Santos is two-fold.  First of all, most parodies are based on people with at lease a modicum of integrity although I’m pushing the example with Trump.  And Santos appears to have none.  Secondly, virtually everything he has told us about himself as been a complete fabrication.  Parody consists in exaggerating things that are familiar. Every politician lies at some point or another.  But I ain’t never seen nothing like George Santos.  

To paraphrase the old saying, when it comes to George Santos, there is no “there” “there.”  And maybe that’s why Yang and Lovitz couldn’t nail him.  There’s nothing familiar upon which to build a character.  

George Santos is a vacuous con artist who literally film-flammed his way into Congress despite all of the information we can easily gather on anybody nowadays.  His worst nightmare will be if he is ever forced to take an Oath to tell the truth as he is incapable of it.  We don’t even know if George Santos is his real name for God’s sake.  

A guy like that cannot be parodied.  Or as I frequently say, typically while wearing my lawyer hat, “you can’t make this up.”

And if you can’t make it up, you can’t make it funny.     

My Sunday Feeling

The news out of Cincinnati has been nothing short of miraculous.  By now everybody knows that Bills defensive back Demar Hamlin went into cardiac arrest on the field last Monday night after getting hit in the chest by Bengals wide receiver Tee Higgins during an otherwise unremarkable tackle.  Hamlin was swiftly attended to by trainers and doctors there on the floor or the stadium.  He was defibrillated at least once.  

At the hospital, he was placed in a coma and put on a ventilator.  As we have learned to our sorrow from the COVID pandemic, getting put on a vent is way serious business.  And it doesn’t much matter how young you are.

The good news here is that as of Friday afternoon the young man is breathing on his own and talking to doctors, teammates and family.  He seems to be neurologically intact.  So he’s past the two big hurdles.  Or biggest.  Hopefully this is a sign that he can be discharged soon and get about the business of healing and living his best life.  

There are people out there who want to take this opportunity to make this incident into a morality play about the whether it is appropriate for society to invest so much time, money and emotional energy into a sport that is as inherently dangerous as football. And I can have this discussion with those people.

However, the injury sustained by Hamlin is not so much a football thing as it is a fluky thing.  The leading theory on what happened to him is that his heart stopped beating due to a rare medical condition called commotio cordis which occurs when a severe blow to the chest results in an electrical impulse that causes the heart to stop beating.  According to what I have read, the condition is pretty much confined to children ages 8-18 who play contact sports.  Even at that, the odds of sustaining such an injury is around 40,000 to 1.  

Still, it happens.  And it kills about 25 children per year, mostly baseball and hockey players.  When I coached tee ball and Little League I constantly worried about a child taking a line drive or a bad hop to the chest.  Thank God it never happened, at least not bad enough to kill anybody.  Most bad hops with the little guys tended to go straight to the kisser.  And nobody ever died from a fat lip. A bag of ice while sitting with mom generally was the extent of the intervention required. 

So, if Hamlin’s near-death experience on the field is a fluke what lessons can we draw from this?  First and foremost we need personnel trained in the art of first aid at every ballgame at every level of sports.  Does this mean that you need the average 25 medical professionals that you can see on the sideline at any NFL game down at the girl’s softball league?  Of course not.  But every coach should be trained in CPR.  There should an ARD defibrillator at every venue where sports are played.  This is the lesson of Demar Hamlin. 

There’s another lesson as well.  We sometimes forget that there are good people in sports.  Who can forget the images of the players kneeled around the stricken Hamlin while he was attended to?  The sight of the Cincinnati coach consoling the coach of the Bills.  There is no professional sport that has its eye affixed to the bottom line like the NFL.  Not only did it suspend the game it ultimately cancelled it.  Rarely has the NFL and the Players Association ever agreed to anything so quickly.  And, last but not least, there was the grace extended by Demar Hamlin’s mother to Tee Higgins, when she assured him that she did not view him as responsible for her son’s plight.  The fact that he indeed was not responsible is beside the point.

I won’t disagree with anybody who says football at the NFL level is damn near a blood sport.  But what happened to Demar Hamlin is no proof of that.  

My New Year’s Day Feeling

As I have written before I’m not big on making New Year’s resolutions.  I guess that’s because, like most folks, I won’t keep them.  Secondly I guess we are all subject to superseding events not under our control.  Like a worldwide pandemic.  

 But I do have some intentions.  Like trying to figure why Blogger up and changes fonts on me and doesn’t allow me to correct it.  So now you’re stuck with reading the rest of this in Times New Roman or whatever this font has shifted to until such time as I figure it out.  

I guess the reason that I am going to stick my neck out with these lowly aspirations is that things finally seem “normal” around here for the first time in 3 years (I guess).  And let’s face it.  The last 3 years have sucked.  No 2 ways around it.  What’s normal?  

Let me start with this.  For the first time in 3 years the Deacon and I will be the only people living in this house.  Joe got a place of his own and hit the bricks the first of December after living here since graduation until he saved up his money and otherwise came to the conclusion that he didn’t want to live with his mom and her geezer husband anymore.  

So that will be interesting.  I remember when we first got married we used to go out all the time.  Mainly because she was tired after working and I am only marginally competent at vegan cuisine.  But will we go back to that?  I dunno.  

I pretty much quit playing guitar and doing photography during the plague.  I quit playing because the “open mic” stuff I used to do shut down.  And as far as I can tell has not come back.  Why I quit taking pictures I don’t know.  I also quit writing as much as I used to.  

I don’t know exactly why.  I think if I were being totally honest, which is a rare departure from standard practice so you better not get used to it Buster,  I think I just kind of shut down.  You now how some people, when faced with seemingly overwhelming and impossible odds, summon up the grit and courage to bravely face the storm and carry on come what may?

I guess I’m not one of those people.  Or at least I am no longer in that number.  I’ve become rather inert lately.  

I need to be ert again.

Maybe not as ert as Sarah, who spent New Year’s Eve in Cuba.  That’s a bit much for me.  You can do crazy stuff like that when you’re 25.  But it’s time for me to at least get back out there while I’m still relatively young and in possession of a quorum of marbles.  

So these are my intentions.  1) go back to the gym (so far so good) 2) write more (and figure out just WTF is going on with this damn font) 3) play guitar and take pictures again.  As the weather improves I’m going to play more golf.  Especially with my friend Wayne and his buddies.  Here’s how they play golf.  They play a scramble.  So far as I can tell only one guy keeps a score in his head. Which the rest of the group ignores. And everybody tees off from the women’s tee.  Much shit is talked for the entire 9 hole round.

Who knew that golf could be fun?  

The Deacon and my nephew Henry ,who is on the way to becoming a big noise in the arts, have encouraged me to sing again.  If I’m going to that means I better get going while still have a public A# and have not developed an “old lady” vibrato yet.  

So how much of this punch list will actually get done?  We’ll see.  Like most folks on the Internet I’m pretty tough behind the keyboard.    

Sarah told me that she would have me some cigars from Cuba next time I see her.  See?  2023 is starting off a whole lot better that 2002 did.  Not so good for old lady vibrato prevention maybe.  But it’s something to look forward to. 

Happy New Year!  

Right?