Open thread

Talk about what you want.

I don't know if any of you have ever worked with a former nurse's aide but seems to me, it's my impression that they tend to look for health problems in other people.  Chef at work has a small lump, probably a cyst on the back of his shoulder.  He's not working shirtless of course so I probably would never have noticed until she told me about it.  Dishwasher somewhat overweight and she says she walks funny and told her she has the wrong shoes.  One day she said I have dry hands and bought me a small bottle of Jergen's which is fine but maybe you don't have enough to do we can put more on your plate.  My late aunt God rest her soul was a retired RN and once told an Amish woman her socks were too tight and was cutting off her circulation so there's a trend here.  Now nobody's coming to work with a tumor on the side of their face the size of a basketball like you see in those infomercials for Mercy Ships.  We all have something.  An imperfection, health ailment or problem that's not life hreatening that we live with or manage or even totally ignore.  Some may see a doctor some may not.  Most of us are not Rockefellers with endless funds.  I work alongside a young Spanish guy with a deformed ear.  I'm sure he's aware of it I could care less.  To be filed under mildly annoying.

Or we can discuss Kate Middleton:)

The proposed ban against TikTok seems rather strange

It's weirdly authoritarian.  Govern me harder Daddy.  I'm not getting this one.

Random Thoughts On Last Tango In Paris (1972)

Directed by Bernardo Bertolucci.  Widely seen as a landmark in the history of sexual explicitness in cinema.  So where was the explicit sex I must have missed it?  Even the uncut version is not overly graphic.  Many people if the movie is mentioned automatically think of butter.  That's a childish mind.  Some of the scenes that come to my mind is the character of Paul played of course by Marlon Brando talking to his dead wife alone in the room as she's being prepared for burial.  To my mind this is some of the best acting in the history of cinema.  Also the classic ending where Jeanne played by Maria Schneider shoots him.   The ending is so open-ended it called for a sequel but there never was one.  She's rehearsing her lines for when the police will interview her later (he was a lunatic, I never knew him, he tried to rape me) but so many people had already seen them together at the dance hall but the movie simply ends with the sultry music coming on.  My takeaway - she was okay with having a kind of strange even perverse relationship with him.  She kept going back to him in the apartment even though she was engaged to another man yet when Paul wanted a normal loving relationship with her she basically kept saying it's over and killed him.  A cinematic and much discussed enigma.  Although not by any stretch an exemplary character he's been through the mill after his wife's gruesome suicide and this is his fate.  A movie with many layers to it it's worth a watch or a few.  The actress appeared nude in many of the scenes while Brando kept his clothes on except for one brief scene early on where they didn't show much.  Much vulgar language throughout.  So that's my take the movie is worth diving into.

The geriatric presidency

If I were Kamala Harris I'd be boning up on foreign policy right now just on the off chance.  It's like when your father dies and he knew about the plumbing but you don't.  Natural causes is like a 50/50 right now.  Rudy Giuliani is pretty much a national joke.  It's like the old shrink tests - Giuliani/Running hair dye.   Even Rush Limbaugh is getting impatient.

The transition seems well underway now.  It is what it is.

There's no legal requirement you have to congratulate the other guy

Trump may give his concession speech a year from now or never.  As long as he leaves the building January 20th.

When are the second stimulus checks coming?

How do the dead vote?

If the dead leaned Republican Trump wouldn't be making an issue of this.

There's normal math and then there's weird math.  Most agreed about the normal math.  The President's lead would shrink in several states once the mail-ins started to be counted.  The strange math led to Trump eventually having razor thin leads in those same states with Biden eventually having the sliver in his favor.  What are the odds of so many of these slivers?  The normal math said a majority of the absentee ballots would favor Biden.  Again most including myself accepted this.  The strange math would have it though that a vast majority of absentee voters voted for Biden.  Odds?  Now you could make the case that Democratic voters took the pandemic more seriously and so went this route but there still has to be quite a few elderly Republican shut-ins out there too.  Lastly Georgia a historically red state seemed to flip overnight.  Were Georgian Republican voters so repulsed by the package of Trump's personality they threw political practicality overboard?  Not likely.

For me it's a case of the weird math and the strange algebra says to check it out.

Thank you for practicing unemployment

How are the people who have binge watched "The Munsters" gonna vote?  The media churning out as many anti-Trump articles as possible can work in reverse.  Will Dr. Fauci retire sometime next year and hit the links?  Meanwhile the New York Times somehow thinks they're mainstream.  Are they performing colonoscopies yet?

Race - How does defunding and dismantling police departments work in practice?  If you hear gunshots in your neighborhood do you call your local community activist?

I haven't been going to church lately.  I don't want to go and they say we're at 25 or 50% capacity and get turned away.  I haven't been tithing either.  Take it up with the Lord.

Today in black and white

A few years back I was in a Stew Leonard's food store and proceeded to pay for a few items.  Unbeknownst to me I handed the cashier a phony ten dollar bill and she went to another department and a man came back informing me the sawbuck was counterfeit AND THAT WAS IT.  The police weren't called and I was simply out of a ten.  FF to Minneapolis and another unarmed black man is dead at the hands of the police.  The starting point was when Mr. George Floyd walked into a deli and handed the clerk a counterfeit twenty dollar bill and the clerk then called the cops.  Things somehow escalated until a thuggish cop kept pressing his knee into the man's neck even after he pleaded "I can't breathe" and he later died at a hospital.  Ensuing protests, riots and looting.

What's wrong with this picture?

The strange state of our union

President Trump's 2020 State of the Union Address --  I thought it in very poor taste and low rent for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to make a show of tearing up Trump's speech at the end but also thought it unjustified that Trump bestowed the Congressional Medal of Freedom on conservative radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh.  I also find NBC's Chuck Todd to be the most openly biased political journalist/analyst on TV today and don't know why they have him.  Getting back to Nancy Pelosi she looked a little irregular during the entire speech with a pained and disconcerted expression throughout and stood up only a few times for the more obvious consensus points Trump made.  Mr. Limbaugh has cancer and the ribbon around his neck put Dems in an awkward position.  I mean how do you exactly stand and clap for a guy who called liberals evil and a dark force on literally every show of his down through the years?

While there was obviously a lot jam-packed into this approximately an hour and a half long speech, the usual optimistic items elaborated by the president on the state of the union these are the two things that interested me and gave the whole night an unusual quality.

On the pro-forma impeachment acquittal in the Senate your thoughts?  Some say it will become easier to impeach presidents now and that this may become more commonplace in the future.  Then there's the very lonely Republican Senator from Utah Mr. Mitt Romney.

Thoughts on self-driving cars

AAA envisions a self-driving car reality and sees this as pretty much inevitable in the near future. I get their news magazine and they seem completely on board with this. I'm not. The level we're talking about here is not fully autonomous so a driver has to be behind the wheel at all times but then he/she mostly lets the car do its thing at least on open highways although I've seen other videos on YouTube showing folks driving cars with adaptive cruise control with the self-driving feature in slower stop-and-go traffic. I'd rather have a fallible self-aware human being in control of the car at all times instead of relaxing and letting advanced tech take over which can and will go wrong. I can probably come up with a list of other reasons why I'm against. What with ai robots and self-driving cars trucks and buses just around the bend and now flying cars on sale for the bored rich and some people on jetpacks (you can easily search all of these on YouTube) what can go wrong???

The Impeachment Inquiry etc.

Kind of tangentially following the political stuff because I don't care anymore. A lot of other stuff on my plate of late but re this impeachment inquiry for me it's kind of weird that there's some kind of connection between the Ukrainian president and digging up dirt on Joe Biden himself and his son. It'd be like saying there's some kind of Tanzanian connection for that matter but the bottom line is you can't impeach someone for simply being an asshole so you have to have something. Hell Trump might complete two terms with the constant background chatter of impeachment talk. Democratic Rep. Elijah Cummings just died at 68 because of poor health. Sen. John McCain died while still in office and of course Alex Trebek with pancreatic cancer is still doing Jeopardy. Seems a trend now work 'til you drop. That ain't gonna be me and I don't see the nobility in it. Soon as I reach the required minimum I'm going online to file my SS. Just saw an interview with documentary filmmaker Ken Burns last night on PBS. He reminds me a lot of Neil deGrasse Tyson for some reason. Their smartness is annoying and do they ever question their own smartness? Burns just did a whole documentary on Country Music which I'm not really into and never could get into not for lack of trying ("...They shot my horse and my wife ran away...") but I did watch parts of it anyway because I like Johnny Cash. Now Burns said he's gonna do one on race which that's another one to slog through God help us. I think we've reached the point where most of us would like to move onto other subjects. Burns said in the interview that Thomas Jefferson had something like a hundred slaves on his estate and we know now that Columbus killed the Indians so you can't really honor anyone these days. I don't know man talk about what you want.

The liberal version of original sin

The House hearings on reparations for slavery.  You can go on down the line.  Should gays get reparations?  Women?  Other historically oppressed groups?  What about the Indians?  Or you can talk about what you want.

& the award for Best New Political Artist goes to AOC

I get the feeling Trump wins reelection in 2020 because the Democratic field is so diluted from which a real powerhouse is unlikely to emerge.  What are there twenty candidates now?  Cardi B may as well run.  Impeachment seems not much worth it to quoth Nancy Pelosi.  My mind is tired.  I've moved onto other things.  It might be a good thing if Maroon 5 stopped churning out new songs.

Technology is getting weird

Can the Singularity be far behind? Give me the 80's. What's going on in the Cloud these days? Now they're talking 5G. What's next on the technological horizon?

The Brett Kavanaugh Accusers

Pres. Trump's SCOTUS nominee -- Usually in cases like this, the classic HE said/SHE said I'll either side with the man (e.g. Clarence Thomas) or not have an opinion for the time being (existentially neutral or only God knows the deal).  When the # of accusers increases then it becomes problematic.  If you're dealing with say four or five different female accusers you can sit there and say it's a travesty against God and Justice and Country but average folk like me begin to ponder.  Sure it can be some evil leftist conspiracy but......So can the FBI conduct a decent investigation in a week?  Was Judge Kavanaugh even properly vetted?  My own preliminary opinion: maybe go with somebody else?

The Church Sex Crisis

With the Pennsylvania grand jury report and some calls for the Pope to resign is the Catholic Church in eclipse?  What's bizarre imo is the seeming lack of "normal" sex scandals (e.g. a high-ranking bishop having an affair with a prioress say).  How did ex-Cardinal Theodore McCarrick rise so far for so long?  Is there no fear of Hell?  How many clerics are in actual prison these days?  Is this a case of trying to destroy the Church from within?  Thoughts:)

Thoughts on the gun control debate (yet again)

It's amazing how fast time is going. Looking over the posting date of my last post I hadn't realized so much time had elapsed before coming up with a new idea. Sorry to my handful of fans. Liberals act like if they were in charge tragedies like the recent newsroom shooting in Maryland wouldn't have happened. Then I'm reading some hyperventilating political/social commentators extrapolating from one weird individual living in his own self-contained weird mental universe that there's some kind of male rage/war against Women. Well as one conservative blogger here said some time ago back in the day re Newtown sometimes bizarre and tragic things happen and there's almost nothing we could have done about it, nothing that could have prevented it so the whole gun control debate becomes a kind of cosmetic discussion imo. Then there's this thing about some revenge porn law that seems to have gotten stuck in the New York State Legislature that won't pass and folks are blaming Google. I'm no attorney but isn't it already illegal to post say nude pictures of myself without my consent on the Web not that you'd want to see? In our zeal to pass new laws based on the latest tragic social circumstance we should first check what's already on the books that maybe need to be better enforced. If you're having sex maybe don't leave the smartphone out? Here's the problem: reality itself is weird and bizarre and tragic things happen, sometimes rarely and in the case of guns for some reason in cycles. There are bizarre and odd individuals walking amongst us right now. All I can say and offer is don't make eye contact:)

The News is a bit off-center of late

Bill Cosby may spend the rest of his life in prison and President Donald Trump may win the Nobel Peace Prize. Haven't googled Bill Cosby's exact age of late. Could be 89, 97 or 105 but Justice has been served. Public disgrace and opprobrium not enough and I'm no legal authority but I thought there was a statute of limitations or something. The Hollywood academies have rescinded his many awards and mere mention and it's as if I Spy never existed. They finally realized Roman Polanski is a perv too and did the same such is the feminist juggernaut a little late in coming though. President Trump is seriously being mentioned as a viable peace prize potential winner with the upcoming Kim Jong-Un summit in Singapore the Stormy Daniels saga being merely a springtime diversion to fuel the news cycle. As an aside I don't see any more tip cups in Dunkin' Donuts and I have a chunk of change to spare. Are the clerks making too much or something?

Trump is Trump - neither conservative or liberal

In the wake of the HS massacre in Parkland, FL President Trump is now taking on the NRA and wants to get both Dems and Republicans on board in a kind of omnibus gun reform bill. Things like expanded background checks, raising the age to buy a gun to 21 and other common proposals. No this is not an alternative reality Trump was simply never that conservative to begin with. It is said that Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein had a kind of stunned smile upon hearing this. Look Trump has a hemorrhoid of a personality but that has nothing to do with baseline politics. Wonder how Michelle Malkin is taking this.

Global warming

Waterfall at the Great Hunger Memorial Park, formerly Woodlands Lake at the V.E. Macy Park in Ardsley NY.