Rant #3,196: Sail Away

This Rant is going to be kind of short—

But not kind of sweet.

I am going to take a few days off from the Blog to get my head together.

There has been a lot of things going on in my life lately, much of which I have spoken about here.

But there is a lot of other stuff that I have not mentioned at all here.

I have to get my hands, my head and my consciousness around all of those things, and I figure that today, on my son’s 28th birthday, is the time to start doing so.

So I am going to take some time off from writing this weekday blog, which has been a godsend for me in so many ways.

I just need to put things in the right order … and there is a method to this madness, which I will explain to you when I finally get back to writing again.

I figure that if I can take maybe a week or so off from doing this writing, I will have a clearer head and be able to pick it up again when I am ready to do so.

It should be a seamless transition.

No, there is nothing physically or mentally wrong with me that I am not telling you about.

I simply need to take a deep breath, and when I come back, take in the fresh air (cough, cough), and I will be as good as ever.

It will take just about a week or eight days or maybe even 10 days, but I feel that I have to hit the pause button right now.

I promise you that I will be back … just not tomorrow, or for the rest of the week into next week.

I generally don’t write the blog on the weekend, so I just look at this as an extended weekend off for me, with every day being a Saturday and Sunday related to not having to write any entries.

I guess you can say that I have given myself my own personal holiday to rev up my motors again.

I could go into rerun mode here, which I actually did several years ago during another such period, but this time, I would rather step away entirely, but I promise, it won’t be for that long--

Just enough for me to get refreshed.

So as we move from the end of August into early September, let me put everything on my own personal boat and temporarily sail away into the sunset … .

Rant #3,195: My Favorite Things

It is funny how you go back to old things as you get older.

At age 66, my yen for chocolate milk continues to be strong … and not just during Passover, when I have waxed poetic about my love for Kosher For Passover U-Bet chocolate syrup and what it does when you pour it into a tall glass of milk.

Yes, even during the dog days of summer, I just love my chocolate milk.

And yes, year-round, it has to be made with U Bet syrup; I will accept nothing less.

The other syrups are OK, but when you mix it into the milk, the final product simply isn’t as good as when you mix U-Bet into the milk.

It simply does not have the same rich taste as U-Bet brings to you.

So why settle for something less, when you can get something magical with U-Bet chocolate syrup—and the Passover version is preferred, as I think it has even a richer taste than the usual U-Bet.

But there are times that U-Bet and whatever you are eating with it just don’t go together, and as they say, “Things Go Better With Coke.”

Coca-Cola continues to be my favorite soda of all of them, and again, I think it has to do with the smoothness of the beverage and its adaptability to any food that you are pairing it with.

I drink a lot of milk—always have, always will—but milk simply does not go with most dinner options, so Coke is my choice, and has always been my choice.

When my sister and I were kids, my mother would not have soda in the refrigerator, as she felt that having it there would preclude us from drinking milk, which is obviously a much healthier beverage.

But as I got older, I was already drinking a lot of milk as it was—my doctor told my mother that I would never break a bone because of all the milk I drank, and I haven’t in my 66 years—but I found that drinking milk while eating a steak or a hot dog or a hamburger just wasn’t cutting it anymore.

So the beverage that I just used to have outside of my house finally ventured inside, and the rest is history.

I still drink lots of milk, and while I don’t drink as much soda as I used to do, when it comes to soda, it has to be Coke.

Pepsi is OK as a substitute, but I actually prefer RC Cola if I can’t have Coke. It is nestled somewhere between Pepsi and Coke--not as sweet as Pepsi but not as smooth as Coke—but even though I do drink other sodas, it generally has to be Coke for me.

And then when I have a Coke, what am I eating with it?

Well, even after 66 years, my favorite foods remain hot dogs and hamburgers, even though I eat lots of fish and pasta and better things for me.

Let’s start with hot dogs, frankfurters, wieners, red hots … whatever you want to call them, I have loved this food probably since the first time I ever had one as a kid.

Having a frank on a bun is just so natural, so compact, so perfect that I even hate to have to chow it down because it looks so good, but I do it anyway.

I prefer Hebrew National hot dogs, but Nathan’s, Sabrett, and a whole host of others are fine too.

But there is nothing better than a Hebrew National hot dog on a bun with some mustard and sauerkraut, all washed down with a Coke.

As for hamburgers, I eat plenty of the fast food variety, but there is nothing better than a real hamburger that you either make yourself from raw chop meat or one that you pick up already made from your local supermarket.

Again, like hot dogs, it just looks perfect on a bun, with a little ketchup, maybe some relish, and maybe some onions and even a slice of melted cheese on top.

It looks so good that you really hate to eat it, but you have to have something to chow down with the Coke that you have sitting in front of you, so down it goes.

It is so funny to think that after 66 years of life, I have not changed one bit when it comes to my favorite food and beverages.

I still like the same things, and even though my adult palette is a bit different from my childhood one, my go-to foods and beverages have remained the same since virtually day one.

And did I mention that I have always liked spinach, always liked cream cheese—Temp Tee please—and always liked peanut butter—Skippy if I can get it?

I may have gotten older, balder, and more skeptical as the years have gone by me, but my food choices have pretty much remained what they are for the length of my life, and probably will continue to be that way until I reach the end.

How about you?

Have your food and beverage choices pretty much remained the same for your entire life?

Hot dog!

Rant #3,194: Pleasant Valley Sunday

August 21!

Yes, as my wife and I were talking about yesterday, the summer has gone pretty quickly, at least for us, and before you know it, Labor Day will be here and the summer will, for all intents and purposes, be over.

One of the reasons that the summer has gone by so quickly for us, I do believe, is that we had the backyard pool at our disposal this summer—

As opposed to last summer, when all we had was a giant bathtub of pea soup.

While our water did not stay crystal clear for the entire season, it was good enough the last few times, and we were able to swim in it yesterday, passing a few summer hours away, assisted by the music that we like to listen to, from the mid-1960s through the mid-1970s.

When we are in the pool, we used to listen to a station on the AM dial from Southern New Jersey that for some reason we were able to get in loud and clear, but for whatever reason, we can’t get in to even a listenable level anymore.

So we re-discovered a long-time Long Island station, WHLI, which has changed its musical format seemingly as many times as one changes their underwear.

For years and years, it was a only station in the area that carried Big Band and 1940s music. It was the only place to hear anybody from Glen Miller to Frank Sinatra to Judy Garland and everyone in between.

And then, probably about at least a decade ago, it completely shifted gears, and carried 1950s music, everyone from Elvis and Dion to Bill Haley and Fats Domino.

And now that it can also be listened to on the FM band and streamed, it recently changed its format to as mid-1960s to mid-1970s playlist, which means you now get music from everyone who was popular during that era, from the Beatles and the Dave Clark Five to Petula Clark and Elton John and the Eagles and … .

We were in the water for about two and a half hours yesterday using the music from that era as our own personal swimming soundtrack, and at about 2:30 p.m., we decided that we had had enough, and started to get out of the water for probably the final time this summer.

And as we were getting out of the water, the last song we heard on WHLI was “Pleasant Valley Sunday” by the Monkees—a song written by Carole King—a song that, at least by its title, was an appropriate “adieu” to our summer backyard pool swimming season.

But on this Sunday, the “barrel full of Monkees” continued once we dried off and took our showers and redressed ourselves, as there was a “The Monkees” TV show marathon on Catchy TV.

Once known as Decades, the network has fallen flat, in my opinion, to rerunning the usual suspects of sitcoms, and I rarely watch the channel now, because the news aspect of the station has been entirely removed, with the 1 millionth reruns of “Cheers” and “Taxi” and “I Love Lucy” in its place.

But this particular weekend, I literally stumbled upon the station running “The Monkees” marathon—I had no idea that it was programmed until I turned the channels to find something to watch—but again, the timing of this marathon was newsworthy, but Catchy simply expects you to know this and they won’t tell you about it.

The reason “The Monkees” was binged this past weekend had to do with the fact that 57 years ago, in /august 1966, the world was getting acquainted with Peter, Micky, Mike and Davy through the pre-release-from-the-TV-show of the act’s first single, “Last Train to Clarksville,” which debuted on the Billboard Hot 100 this very month and rose up the charts to No. 1 without a TV series to promote the song for much of its ascent.

The show premiered on September 12, 1966, so having the binge this week pretty much replicated when “The Monkees” came into our consciousness, at least as a musical act.

Anyway, I watched several episodes—shows I have seen hundreds of times since they were new—and you really have to put the show into context of 1966, and not 2023, to really understand and appreciate how completely revolutionary the show was for that time.

Right in the middle of the Vietnam War, here was a show where the “younger generation” completely ruled the roost.

There were no parental authority figures on the show, and “The Monkees” focused entirely on the 20-something boys, with their long hair and “mod” clothes and “groovy” way of communicating.

So notwithstanding the millions upon millions of records that they sold, and keep on selling to this day, the show—which might look trite by 2023 standards—was groundbreaking and revolutionary in a period where the standard sitcom fare was “My Three Sons” and “The Lucy Show,” great sitcoms but shows that followed the standard sitcom format.

I was particularly interested in the two documentary-style shows that were part of the series, “The Monkees In Concert” and “The Monkees in Paris,” episodes which I don’t think I foully understood as a kid but which I have a new appreciation for as an adult.

These two episodes truly were outside the box of what the usual sitcom format was, and still is, and showed the Monkees as what they actually had become, pop phenomenons that were known both nationally and internationally through the show and their music.

On the show, they were simply a struggling garage rock band, but in these two episodes, that theme was pretty much left in the dust, and the foursome were shown to be among the most popular people on the planet at the time, constantly pursued by the same younger generation that they were expressly created for.

Life imitates the Frankenstein Monster if you will, but those two episodes are among the best of the series, so different from the norm—even the normal Monkees episode—that they stand out from that bunch of any sitcom shows before or since.

So it is now Monday, back to the same old, same old, but I have to say that this past weekend was quite nice, with a real “Pleasant Valley Sunday” to cap it all off.

Rant #3,193: It Was a Very Good Year (?)

Good morning!

Get up out of bed!

It is time to begin the day!

I finally had a decent sleep of about eight hours or so, so I can’t complain this morning saying “last night, I didn’t get to sleep at all … no, no.”

It is Friday, August 18, the 230th day of the year, and we have just 135 days left before we kiss 2023 goodbye and move right into 2024.

But to me, it might just actually be 1966 …

Let me explain.

I was nine years old in 1966, as bushy tailed and wide-eyed as anybody of that age was way back when.

My family had been living in our new housing development, Rochdale Village in South Jamaica, Queens, New York, for two years, and quite frankly, the place was the perfect community to grow up and for young families to live in.

The tears to that core hadn’t really turned up yet, and the world appeared to be our oyster.

Right now, back 57 years ago, I was in Rochdale Village Day Camp with all of my friends, and nothing could be more fun.

In 1964 and 1965, I discovered baseball, and once I discovered it, I was hooked for life.

I rooted for the New York Yankees, as my father did, and I knew that I was rooting for the most storied franchise in professional sports even all those years ago.

The problem was that while Mickey Mantle, Whitey Ford and many of the other great players that they won so many World Series with were still around in pinstripes, they had seemingly all turned old at the same time, and the 1966 club was terrible.

In 1966, the New York Yankees ended up in last place in the American League, the last time up to the present time that they ended up at the bottom of the standings.

Flash forward to 2023, and yes, the Yankees still have Aaron Judge, Gerrit Cole, and a contingent of fine players, but many of those players have seemingly gotten old at the same time, and the Yankees find themselves hopelessly in last place in the American League East.

As of right now, they are the only team in the division with a losing record.

I can still root for Judge and Cole and Gleybar Torres and Anthony Volpe and the team as a whole, but the reality is that the 2023 team is terrible, and unless things change quickly, they will follow the 1966 team as cellar dwellers.

And let’s be honest about it, rooting for your favorite team when you are nine years old is way different than rooting for your favorite team when you are 66 years of age.

I lived and died with the Yankees when I was a kid of this age, so I mainly suffered with them and the exploits of that era’s Roy White, Mel Stottlemyre, Bobby Murcer and Fritz Peterson, that generation’s “Core Four” of players.

And then there was Jerry Kenney, Steve Whittaker, and Ross Mosschito …

Today, I follow the team, but not with the laser focus that I had way back when, when I really looked up to these guys as my heroes.

Today … eh … let’s move on … the team being in last place simply doesn’t affect me as it did way back when. I have so many other more important problems to deal with, to be honest with you.

But let’s still look at 1966 for a while.

According to a couple of web sites I visited, here are the prices that our parents paid for certain items:

Fresh eggs (1 dozen): $0.60 ($4.82 in today’s dollars)
White bread (1 pound): $0.22 ($1.77 in today’s dollars)
Sliced bacon (1 pound): $0.95 ($7.63 in today’s dollars)
Round steak (1 pound): $1.11 ($8.92 in today’s dollars)
Potatoes (10 pounds): $0.75 ($6.03 in today’s dollars)
Fresh delivered milk (1/2 gallon): $0.56 ($4.50 in today’s dollars)

And gas was 32 cents a gallon, which would be about $3.03 in today’s dollars.

And on my end, I had a full head of hair then, and it used to cost me $1 to get it cut each month.

And for $1, I could get two slices of pizza and a drink—with garlic knots for free—and have 25 cents left over to buy two comic books or five packs of baseball cards.

It was a different world back then, for sure, but when I look at the baseball standings, it just all brings me back to 1966, when I was nine years old and just discovering my world.

It is great to be nine years old once, but somehow, 2023 does not seem like 1966 to me, no way, no how.

Have a great weekend, and this 66 year old old fogey will speak to you again on Monday ... as I party like it's 1966!

Rant #3,192: Mind Games

I finally crashed last night into this morning.

After several nights of having an unsatisfying sleep, I finally went into slumber overtime, and I woke up about an hour later than I normally do.

Not good, because I am on something of a schedule here, which revolves around my mother’s needs.

I couldn’t even shave today like I wanted to do, and before you know it, her attendant is going to be here … and right now, I have no time to do much of anything, because my mother will soon be up and about.

Since she will be up, I have to prepare breakfast for her, and I will have to stay with her for a reasonable time until the attendant arrives—

And then I have to take my son to work, and then, I plan to do my family’s food shopping, so I won’t be back to the house until late morning.

I am kind of used to all of this after months of doing it, but when I wake up an hour late, it makes things even more difficult.

I did not immediately conk out yesterday.

I watched the AEW Wrestling show that they have on TV every Wednesday night, and even though I usually pass out on that show at about 8:30 p.m. or so, last night, I ended up watching the entire show, which is where everything related to sleep—or not sleeping—began.

This particular show was, in my opinion, the best two-hour weekly show that the organization has ever put on TV—there was just so much going on during this show that I simply had to stay up to watch it through.

They are planning for next week’s wrestling show—called “All In”--at Wembley Stadium in England, where they will probably fill the stadium with 80,000 fans, making it one of the largest wrestling shows ever, and certainly akin to WWE’s yearly “Wrestlemania” extravaganza.

The main event pits challenger Adam Cole versus champion MJF—from Plainview, right here on Long Island—for the AEW championship, and there are also a number of other matches that look pretty good, too.

So yesterday’s show was a buildup to that, where they had matches that led to announcements of matches on that England show.

There was blood, guts, a lot of yelling and screaming about nothing … but it just kept me going until the show was over at 10 p.m.

Then I tried to go to sleep, and was pretty much unable to do so.

I guess I was wound up from that show.

It took me about two hours to get to sleep—probably at midnight—and I did wake up several other times from midnight to 7 a.m., when I finally got up—so it was not a restful sleep, but whatever I got from it, and however long it was, I guess you can say that I crashed, sleeping way past when I normally get up.

It is a bit difficult to sleep right now anyway, as not only do I have a lot on my mind, but we have a monitor in the room so we can see how my mother is doing when she sleeps, and while it does allow us to keep tabs on her—she has gotten up and fallen a few times, although she normally gets up, goes to the bathroom, and crawls back into the bed and goes back to sleep—it seems we always have one eye on the monitor, and the other eye closed for sleep.

It is not ideal, but it is our way of life now.

And as for my mother, she really is improving in every way possible.

Her vital signs are excellent, she is moving around more, she is eating more, and the best thing is that she is in absolutely no pain.

She has been examined on about a weekly basis, and no one can believe that a 92 year old is at this level of physical shape, especially based on where she has been over the past several months.

But the dementia that she has is really casting a pall on everything, and right now, it is no better and no worse than it was a few weeks back, so her mind is in something of a holding pattern while her body continues to improve.

But her attitude is just so positive that it leads me to believe that the sky is the limit for her, and we just have to give it time to see where she can go with all of these obstacles in front of her.

Dementia is a cruel disease, and it takes no prisoners at all.

It can affect you or I at any time in our lives … or completely bypass us.

It is sad to see a mind eaten away by this, but if there is one person who can leap over this malady and make this situation as good as it can be, it is my mother.

I am totally convinced of that as I see her get better physically by the day.

Her mind might be Jello, but her tenacity remains, and that makes everything better for all of us.

I just hope that she can continue on her long road to wellness for as long as she wants to do so.

My mother is my main focus right now, and she is doing so much better that it is truly remarkable.

I just wish her mind wasn’t playing games with her, but let’s take it one step at a time.

Rant #3,191: Stayin' Alive

The Bee Gess?

Remember them?

They were the Australian rockers who made a complete change of path in the mid-1970s over to disco with their music on the “Saturday Night Fever” soundtrack.

The brother act—Robin, Maurice and Barry—had already logged numerous rock-oriented hits in the 1960s and 1970s, including “Lonely Days” and “New York Mining Disaster 1941.”

They alienated many of their long-time fans by going disco, but they made more fans by putting out songs like “Night Fever” and “Staying’ Alive,” songs which became cornerstones of the disco craze.

They also became ubiquitous on the Hot 100 chart for writing songs for other artists, everyone from one-hot wonder Samantha Sang to Barbra Streisand and Dolly Parton, and of course, their ill-fated brother Andy Gibb.

But when they tried to go back to their rock roots, the effort pretty much failed, alienating both older fans who had been turned off by their disco hits and newer fans who only knew them as a disco act.

They had a few big records into the 1990s—“One” was one of them—but their popularity had waned as the years went on.

Today, Barry Gibb is the only one still standing, as twins Robin and Maurice have both passed on.

Why am I writing about all of this?

In the little time I have to relax—down to next to nothing nowadays—I like to digitize my records, a process which allows me to put analog music into the MP3 format and place them on a thumb drive and play them in the car.

I was doodling around my record collection a few weeks back, and I just came upon my Bee Gees album collection, which is substantial.

I was always a fan of theirs, but like many of their fans who were into their music when they were a rock act, I got completely turned off by their disco era music, so among the 20 or so LPs I have of theirs in my collection, no, “Saturday Night Fever” is not among them.

I had almost forgotten that I had so many of their records—I also have a handful of 45s, too—and I decided to start to digitize them in between everything else I have to do.

I have thus digitized seven of their LPs, from their first American album—aptly named “1st,”—and some of their later collections, including “E·S·P”—an album that was a worldwide hit but got little airplay in the U.S.

And I even digitized one of the multitude of “Greatest Hits” albums that they have put out, plus the album that pushed them closed to a disco sound without going whole hog into it, “Main Course,” featuring “Jive Talking’” and “Nights On Broadway,” the latter of which people forget got a lot of airplay on some of the top rock stations around at the time.

But I am most interested in those early LPs, like “Horizontal,” “Idea” and their aforementioned first LP, because that is where it all started for them in the U.S. and when I first became so interested in their music.

Those early albums—where some people thought they were the Beatles in disguise—are interesting collections, with one or two legitimate hits on each one bookended by a lot of psychedelic meanderings, some good, some sounding like vanity projects.

But I have to say that they sounded like no other band back then, with the three brothers’ voices being very distinctive, including that falsetto sound that no other act had (except Frankie Valli with the Four Seasons).

And listening to these LPs more than 50 years after the fact, you could just tell that they were milking that unique sound for all that it was worth, and they were doing it quite successfully.

I have to say that it adds to the pleasure I am getting in rediscovering these albums that these LPs that I have are in fine shape, with minimal nicks and pops and very little scratching. if any at all.

As a child, Barry Gibb was something of a child prodigy with music and the Bee Gees—originally named after Barry Gibb himself, not “Brothers Gibb” as it was later worked out to stand for—were huge hits in their native Australia at an early age.

They actually put out two LPs prior to having product in America, so even though their first American LP came out in 1967, they had been recording for many years prior to that.

I think the Bee Gees are something of musical chameleons, shifting their shape and their sound to fit into whatever music was popular at the time: first psychedelic rock, then 1970s pop, then disco, and finally back to rock and then to pretty much soft pop.

But they became one of the rock era’s top acts, and even if you dismiss the disco era, they have a fine cadre of songs that I am just rediscovering.

Just something to do when I have the time to relax, which is in between most of my time, where I am busy as can be.

Rant #3,190: Backfire

I had an interesting, frustrating experience yesterday afternoon—

And it proved once again that for some reason, there is a haze above me that continues to linger, and even when I do everything the right way, it seems to come out wrong.

As regular readers of this Rant know, my previous car died in June after nine years and more than 98,000 miles of service.

It was a great car, one that I purchased new after my previous car was destroyed in a horrible accident when a teenager went through a Stop sign and T-boned my car.

Anyway, when my latest car just gave out, I needed transportation quickly, so I settled for a three-year-old used car that had about 22,000 miles on it, and although it has taken me several weeks to get used to it, I am fairly satisfied that I made the right decision to get a used car, because quite frankly, with the interest rate where it is, getting a new car would have been difficult for me financially.

Even the used car is pricey, but not as bad as a new car is.

My payments are spread out over 72 months on this used car, and I made my first payment online, something I generally do not like to do.

I like making payments by writing out checks, because I feel that I am more in control of my pocketbook when I do it this way … and yes, I guess I am a bit old fashioned, too.

So the first payment was made online, and then I received the bill in the mail for the second payment, and I paid that one by writing a check and sending it out on August 1, or weeks before it was actually due.

We received our mail late yesterday, and lo and behold, there was a bill in there from the company which handles my car account—the same bill that I had paid at the beginning of the month.

I called the company, and the recording said that I was in arrears because I had not paid my bill on time.

I finally spoke to someone there and to make a long story short, even though I had sent out payment on the first of the month, as of August 14 they had not received my payment, so my account went into collections.

I argued this point with an associate and then I demanded to speak to a manager, and the sad truth is that they “sort of” put my account into collections because of non-payment—they never received my check in the regular mail.

(“Sort of” is my term … they call it a “Semi-Miranda” or something like that … it means that if I don’t pay up ASAP, my account will fully go into collections.)

I still had time to get out of the “sort of” collections. but I had to make payment right then and there, after I checked with my bank which also said that the check I sent out was never cashed.

I had to put a stop on that check—which they should have charged me for but as of this moment, they haven’t—and then pay the bill ASAP either online or over the phone.

I called the lender back, explaining the situation to them once again, and to make a long story short, I ended up paying the bill over the phone, with a more than $3 surcharge added to the payment.

Yes, I could set up auto-pay, so I don’t have to even think about the bill being paid; I could simply manually pay online each month, but I prefer to pay my bills the old fashioned way by check--

But I guess in this world, that is a prohibitive way of doing things, as was proven by my latest escapade, where the U.S. Postal Service completely failed me.

Let me see what I do when I get the next bill, #3 in the series, which should be coming in about two weeks or so.

But all of this just adds to the agita I already have with everything swirling around me like it is—and again, even when I do things right, these things seem to turn out wrong.

I cannot explain this phenomenon,, but I am under that cloud now, and I simply don’t know how to rectify it.

Any suggestions?

Rant #3,189: My Little Town

Everything happens in Massapequa …

Yes, my adopted hometown—moved here from Queens with my family in July 1971—seems to be the center of everything as life ebbs and flows over the decades.

I brought this up in an earlier Rant last month, where so many things happen in Massapequa and its adjoining Massapequa Park that captures the interest of the nation and often the world.

And there is plenty of good and bad in that—the “Long Island Lolita” ring a bell?—and the past few days have put an apostrophe on that.

We have local, national and international news stories that have happened right here or involve people from right here.

Let’s take the good first.

Massapequa International Little League’s girls’ softball team won its World Series the other day, and this captured the attention of a lot of people, in particular since the media has decided that an out-of-left-field focus on women’s sports is their next path to explore and ram our heads into.

The media over-emphasized our national soccer team for a variety of reasons, but that fell flat as that team failed to capture gold this time around.

And soccer is just a niche sport here, played by a team that was as hard to love as could possibly be, a group that attached politics and anti-America bravado to just about everything they did.

But now, you have a local softball team made up of 12 years olds winning their World Series, and it kind of makes everyone feel good.

Like the Massapequa boys who were successful last year, these are kids playing a kids game not for the money—there is none, of course—but for the fun of it.

And to win the whole enchilada …well, you just know that a parade is in the offing, and it is well deserved.

But on the other side of the coin—not too far away from where that eventual parade will be held--you have a car accident that made headlines not just here, but all over the world, due to the severity of it, shown in the horrible pictures that emerged from the crash site, just about five minutes away from where I live.

An innocent family was out celebrating a job promotion with a jaunt to get ice cream when another car, driven by somebody who was so hopped up on drugs that he was driving more than 150 mph in a 40 mph zone, rammed them in the rear of their car when they were stopped at a light.

Four people have now perished form the impact, at least three of them not knowing what hit them and a fourth passing over the weekend.

The car’s other two occupants are injured to an unsightly degree, and if they survive, they will certainly be hampered for life by these injuries.

The guy that hit them? Well, this moron survived—of course—but was found to have at least cocaine and fentanyl in his body.

The police also found syringes strewn throughout his car, which leads you to believe that he was doing plenty of other stuff beyond what was found in his system.

He also has several other DWIs on this driving record, so this guy has a history of not being much of a choir boy when he gets behind the wheel.

This fool was placed under arrest from his hospital bed, and he faces so many charges that if convicted on all of them, this young man will spend decades in prison.

The images of the family’s mangled car was enough to upset even the most jaded person, as it literally looked like a bomb had been dropped on that car—the reality of which was that that “bomb” was the car being driven by that young doped-up fool.

And an innocent family was pretty much wiped off the face of the earth because this guy needed his kicks and not only got what he needed, but decided to drive when he was higher than the Hubble Telescope.

Totally ridiculous.

And then we have Massapequa’s biggest story, which has already been dubbed the eventual “Trial of the Century” by some, months before it has even convened--The Gilgo Beach Murder, where a Massapequa resident has been charged with the murders of at least three prostitutes and possibly others.

Now it has come out that his wife has cancer and that her medical coverage is running out as her husband sits in jail.

His wife has become the “Sgt, Schultz” of this entire investigation—“I know nu-think”—and you just know that this woman knows plenty more about her husband than she is letting on … maybe not about the murders,, per se, but about her husband’s questionable behavior that might have led up to what he has been charged with doing.

Heck, her kids even have their own separate lawyer, exclusive from their mom’s lawyer. Leading me to believe that what their mother knows hopefully won’t cast a bad light on the kids’ needs going forward.

How could the wife not know anything about her husband’s dalliances?

Seems unfathomable to me, but what do I know?

Maybe love is really blind.

But whatever the case, it all happens in Massapequa and Massapequa Park.

Why?

I don’t know, but it does …

My little town.

Rant #3,188: Machines

It is crazy how things work—or don’t work.

Yesterday, I told you about my old air conditioner, which I felt had sprouted its last breath of cold air on Wednesday night into Thursday morning with water cascading out its front end.

I personally was ready to go out and buy another air conditioner, but I figured I would give it one last try just to make sure that that night’s performance wasn’t just a blip.

So I put it on late yesterday afternoon after I was done with my work, and from 4:30 p.m. to 6:30 a.m. it was on—

And it purred like a kitten.

No drips no drops, just cool air.

I can’t explain it, but it ran last night as if it was 1999.

We might just have a situation like we have with the computer that I am typing out this Rant on.

As regular readers of this blog know all too well about, I have had trouble booting up this computer every morning for many, many months; sometimes it goes right on, other times, I have to take the plug out and try to get it going multiple times for it to come to the home screen.

In fact, today was one its better days, taking me just two times to get it going.

Now our air conditioner might be in the same position.

Maybe it will work to perfection on some days and nights,, maybe on other days and nights it will perform like it did the other night.

It is hard to tell, but I can live with that, just like I have with the computer for these past many months.

Both are eventually going to go to the electronics graveyard, but I will milk these things until they do.

And what about my family’s pool, the center of my total summer consternation a year ago, when the water was reminiscent of pea soup no matter what we did to it to make it clear and swimmable?

It has been great this year.

Changing over to salt water—and employing a whole new mechanism to handle the changeover from chlorine--we have gone into the pool numerous times, and the pea soup of last season has been replaced by cool, crisp and clear water—

Up until the other day.

Doing my weekly pool maintenance, I poured some algaecide into the pool this past Sunday, and for whatever reason, what we got the very next day was something that resembled a Mr. Bubble bubble bath.

It was soap-y all over, and my wife actually tried to remove as much of the bubbly mass as she could.

So today, after not having to bother with the pool pretty much at all during the length of the summer, I have to bring in a water sample to the pool store to test if the pool is still swimmable.

I know that they are going to prescribe more chemicals to be thrown into the pool, but the season is just about over—we have the pool scheduled to be closed down in about a month—so if I do put any more chemicals into it, it will hopefully be a slight amount.

It just doesn’t pay at this point to go whole hog on this, not with maybe a week or two more of possible swimming, based on other years’ experience.

So maybe the filter is befuddled, maybe some other electronic mechanism on the pool is not working—who knows?

Machines … when they work well, they make life so much better, but when they don’t work and give you problems, they are such a massive headache that you wish you didn’t have to rely on them as much as you do.

This whole thing is best said in a mid-1960s song by the British Invasion rock group Manfred Mann.

They had a number of worldwide hits in the mid to late 1960s—“The Might Quinn” and “Do Wah Diddy” among them--but the song I am referring to wasn’t one of them—although I think it is one of their best songs, and fits the theme of this blog entry perfectly.

It is a song called “Machines,” and with lyrics supplied by AZ Lyrics.com, I think you just might agree:

“Machines, machines
They keep right on movin'
Machines, machines
They keep right on movin'

But I am weak
I want to go on home
Too tired to speak
But they won't let me alone, yeah

Machines, machines
They keep right on going'
Machines, machines
They keep right on going'

I've got to find
A place to rest my head
Machine, he smiles at me and says
"I'm gonna be your bed, yeah"
Oh, yeah

Machines, machines
We made them to serve us
Machines, machines
We built them to serve us

But 'til the day
I'm buried in my grave
Yes, right until that day, I know
I'll always be your slave
A slave, a slave, a slave

To the machines, machines
They keep right on winning
Machines, machines
They keep right on winning”

You can listen to the song at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VQNC2Qx9S9g

I think I will leave it at that.

Have a great weekend, and I will speak to you again on Monday.

“Clank … drip … bang … smash … pea soup … bubble bath …

Stop!!!!!

Rant #3,187: This Just Doesn't Seem To Be My Day

A short column today … too much going on today to go into much detail, but what is going on is only peripherally related to my mother, so if there is a silver lining in this rain cloud, that is it.

With everything happening here—which I am not going to go into specifics about right now—one thing that kept my wife and I up last night was our window air conditioner, which after more than 35 years of service—yes, 35 years!—appears to have finally died on us.

It has struggled the last year or two, so we knew the time would eventually come where we needed a new unit.

The last two years or so, it has cooled down our bedroom as best as it could, but it really never made the room cold, it simply removed the heat from the room. It made it comfortable enough to be in and sleep in, but it did not continue to have the capacity make the room cold, just habitable.

That was preceded by a bird—or perhaps another animal, like a squirrel—somehow either crashing into it or getting caught in it a few years ago. I was in the room when it happened, and to hear the poor animal trying to extricate itself from the machinations of the unit was downright disheartening, to say the least, but it did not help the air conditioner either.

Then last night, at about 2 a.m. in the morning my wife woke up and put on the light, and as I opened up one eye and then the next one, she told me that something was dripping in the room, or at least she heard the sound of something dripping.

Honestly, I did not hear anything, as I was pretty much still in my sleep mode, but when I finally cleared my head, I also started to hear the “ker-plunk” of dripping, and lo and behold, something was dripping—

And it was coming from the air conditioner inside our room.

I shut the unit off, took off the cover, and lo and behold, a thick sheet of ice had coalesced right inside the unit, and rather than the water going outside the unit as it is supposed to, it was doing the reverse, dripping water from the melting ice inside, all over an old backpack that just happened to be resting under it.

I got a towel, put it underneath the unit to catch any more drips, opened the window, and we both tried to go back to sleep, only partially successful in that regard.

I woke up two hours later with one of the worst allergy attacks I have had in recent memory—blowing my nose incessantly for at least 10 minutes with such ferocity that I had to go into the bathroom to do so, lest I wake up my wife with all the noise—and then I finally was able to go back to sleep when my body got back to some sense of normalcy.

I woke up at 6 a.m., and I immediately checked the towel--and it was as dry as when I took it out of the linen closet to put it there, meaning that no other water had come out of the unit.

I will check the air conditioner today to see if that was nothing more than an aberration, but I have a sneaking suspicion that we are going to need a new unit, and the faster it is installed the better.

I have terrible allergies … my allergies have been on high this entire wretchedly hot summer, and I think the uptick in the use of the air conditioner during this ultra-hot summer did major, irreparable damage to it.

Look, I can’t complain about the use we got out of this unit, I first bought it during my first marriage when we lived in a neighboring town, and since it was such a good unit at the time, I took it with me when my parents built up their house to accommodate my family—and it has worked throughout my second marriage.

At more than 35 years—and much like my old car which gave me nine years and nearly 100,000 miles—how can I complain about an air conditioner that gave my family that many years of service?

I can’t, so I won’t.

In fact, I hope we can still use this air condoner after all.

And it is a Sanyo, of all brands … does that brand even exist anymore?

To top everything off, the cherry on the cake was this morning, my belt literally tore itself into tatters, so I am without a belt.

My new electric razor wasn’t cutting my whiskers today, either, taking me twice as long to shave as it should have.

Maybe that gizmo is next on the hit parade.

And heck, this is not as short a Rant as I thought it would be.

All I can say and ask is “What’s next?”--

And I hope that I don’t get a reply.

Rant #3,186: Real Thing

Did you ever get into the “fake” meat fad?

I did for a short while, but I don’t even bother anymore.

While some of those plant-based meats really don’t taste that bad—with the Beyond Meat label featuring the best taste of the bunch, in my opinion—this was nothing but a fad, not a long-term thing.

We know that the constant eating of red meat is not that good for you, but if you don’t eat the real thing seven days a week, some actual beef once or twice a week isn’t going to kill you—and we do know that most people do need some real meat in their systems to have a balanced diet.

But ever cautious about what real meat can potentially do to you, companies seemingly sprang out of nowhere a few years ago touting their plant-based offerings—everything from hot dogs and hamburgers and sausage—and stating that this was the healthier way to go.

Even fast food restaurants started to offer non-beef-based offerings, and it looked like the plant-based option was not only here to stay but here to take a giant cut out of the sales of real meat-based foods.

Then for whatever reason, sales started to drop off about a year or so ago, and I think the reason was that people jumped on the bandwagon—as I did for a short while—sampled what was out there, and figured that if they could not have the real thing—or as close to it, with chicken and turkey knockoffs having been around for ages—then what was the sense of having the plant-based offerings?

I personally tried a number of plant-based company’s burgers, and some of them were pretty decent—the aforementioned Beyond Meat and, believe it or not, Wal-Mart’s own version of a plant-based burger—but most of the ones that I tried tasted like, well, plants.

The Beyond Meat version of a burger was actually pretty good, but I did wonder how they got the taste to where it replicated that of a regular red meat burger … and I think that I wasn’t the only one to have that question.

Sure, we were eating “healthier” with the plant-based burger—or at least we were told that by the companies producing them—but with all the chemicals in these offerings which were used to duplicate the taste of a real burger, were we really eating healthier, or was this just a ruse?

I think it was a ruse … and again it is not like we don’t have viable alternatives to red meat in our burger options such as those made with chicken and turkey.

Thus, why eat the plant-based burger, which was full of things we don’t really need to ingest, when we had other more traditional and viable alternatives to red meat?

Look, not everyone eats red meat.

There are vegetarians, there are vegans, and there are people—like my wife—who do not fit into either of those categories, but pretty much stays away from real meat and gravitates toward the turkey knockoffs.

Anyway, I guess the plant-based offerings simply give shoppers another option when they buy “meat” items, but I do think the fad is over.

In my house, I buy both red meat and turkey meat options in burgers, franks and chop meat, so my wife really mixes things up with the weekly dinner menu.

In fact, last night, we had fish, and we also eat pasta, too.

I happen to think that most families are like that now, and a company that puts out the plant-based offerings—like Beyond Meat—is going to have to recognize that it is simply a niche option—

And its ledger books—the real determinant of success—will tell them that too, as their stock price is down and thus, they don’t have the profits that they had for a short time when people were trying out their products.

I know that I, personally, gave them a real shot to be a regular part of my diet, but every time I bit into one of their burgers,, well, it was OK, but not the same experience I had with the real meat version of the burger—and I simply did not believe the hype that I was eating “healthier” with all the obvious processing done with these non-red meat offerings.

I liken what the plant-based industry is going through now with what the electric vehicle industry is currently going through.

Sure, you can drive an electric car, but why would you?

You are not saving the environment as the some would have you believe, you are inconveniencing yourself when you are running low on power, and there simply is nothing like riding a gas-powered car on the roads of America as opposed to the heavier and electricity-inefficient EVs.

So again, the plant-based offerings—as the EV offerings are—are simply another option, a fad, and really, nothing more.

So if you want partake of them, go right ahead.

Me, give me an All-American Hebrew National hot dog any time, and I will be happy as can be.

Rant #3,185: Dreaming

Since I lost my job nearly four years ago, I periodically have work-related dreams, that are kind of like nightmares, that haunt me at night.

I had another one yesterday night, but this time, it reflected as much on my wife as it did on me.

My wife retired some time ago--she had just had enough of what she was going through as a teller in a popular bank, which shall go nameless.

The bank has an anti-older-worker youth kick, and an anti-white manifesto that they actually had the guts to publish a few years ago so anyone could read it, so I will let you figure out what bank I am talking about.

Anyway, she was able to get a job in a restaurant, and regular readers of this column know what happened there—she had a workplace accident and hasn’t worked since that day, three months ago. The case is in workman’s compensation, so who knows when it will be completed.

Anyway, while my wife is not yet 100 percent, she is beginning to get a little antsy, in particular with no money coming in other than Social Security, so she has applied for a couple of cashier jobs at local retailers—

And she has found out, as I did, that the proof is in the pudding, because she has had very few call backs, most probably because of her age—but go prove it.

Anyway, she applied to a retailer around the corner from where we live—who also shall remain nameless—and she actually has a job interview coming up tomorrow.

So I went to bed last night, and I had a dream/nightmare that reflects on my wife’s situation as much as it does mine.

I am in a big room, along with dozens of other job seekers, looking for a cashier job with, of all companies, JCPenney.

I am sitting there dutifully, and I have my resume in hand plus a ticket that they gave me with a number on it, and when my number is called, I [presumably will be called up for an interview, as the numbers are going in order, and I think in the dream I had number 125.

As I wait for my number to be called, I looked through a glass end table where I had rested my arm while waiting, and lo and behold, I see that there are a couple of coins—dimes and nickels, no quarters or pennies (yes, I do see the connection to the name of the retailer there)—on the floor underneath the table.

I go down to the ground, and reach for the coins, of which there must have been at least a half dozen, and I put the retrieved coins in my pants pocket.

But as I get up,, I notice that I don’t have the ticket that they gave me with the number on it, the one with number 125 on it, the one I need to get called for an interview.

I look all around, but I can’t find it, as they call up the person ahead of me, number 124—I don’t remember if it was a man or a woman—to be interviewed.

So I am in panic because I waited so long to be interviewed—125 was my number, so I presume that 124 people were called before me—and I don’t have that ticket.

It has vanished into thin air.

But for some reason, they never call number 125, skipping over me for 126, 127, 128 and so on.

I run up to the front desk of the room, and I question the ticket caller, but the caller does not reply to me, keeping on his brisk pace of calling numbers way beyond 125—but he never called 125, skipping over me whether I had the ticket or not.

When I see that the ticket caller was ignoring me, I turn to the crowd and tell them the following (or something very much like it):

“This is a phony job recruitment,” I yelled out. “They don’t really have any cashier jobs available. They just post these jobs to see what is out there as far as the talent pool is concerned. They don’t really have the jobs … they are phony, and no one here is going to get a cashier job.”

I yelled this as people pressed past me as their number was called—and then I woke up in something of a sweat.

Look, I know for a fact that companies do post supposedly open jobs that don’t really exist, just to see what is out there as far as talent is concerned.

They have no intention of hiring, but want to collect resumes just in case they do have a job opening in a particular area. They pick and choose from the resumes they already have, making the talent search, and the eventual hiring of that talent, that much easier for them.

And some of the major job search engines—including the one whose name starts with an “I”—do post phony job entries to entice the company which is mentioned in the phony ad to take out a paid job ad with then.

This happened with my old place of business where I brought up one morning to the COO that as I was searching for jobs—it was kind of accepted at this point in time that all the six employees we still had were looking for work elsewhere—that I found a job ad for an editor’s position on this search engine listing my employer as the business having this job opening, and the COO explained it all to me, so I know that this type of action does exist.

(We went out of business about a month later.)

None of these actions are illegal, by the way, and looking back, of the more than 1,000 jobs that I applied for from mid-October 2019 to when I was about to fall off of the unemployment roles about a year later, I would estimate that 75 percent of the jobs that I applied for actually did not exist; most of my job searching took place when the pandemic was in full force, companies were not hiring, but they could see what was out there by putting up fake job ads, and the information they gathered could be used when the pandemic was over and they were actually hiring again.

So there is some sanity in my insanity, and I guess that it all adds up to the fact that I am worried that my wife is going to fall into the same work abyss as I have been in for nearly four years—if she isn’t in it already.

I wish my wife well on her interview, but I know all too well that there is a lot of monkey business that goes on with advertising for jobs, and I just hope that everything goes well and she actually gets this job.

She needs this job mentally, emotionally, physically and financially, and maybe she will have more luck than I have had.

I have run into brick walls; maybe she will be able to run right through those same walls!

We can only dream … .

Rant #3,184: Hope and Deliverance

The completely despicable episode that happened in New York City’s sacred Union Square Park firmly demonstrated what is wrong with this country and what is wrong with the world right now.

If you didn’t see the ruckus that happened there his past Friday afternoon, then the best way I can describe it is by using the word “mayhem,” because that’s what it was.

Some YouTube influencer proclaimed to his flock that he would be handing out 300 PlayStations, gift cards and other such useless prizes at the location at about 3 p.m. on that date, and not hundreds, but thousands of kids—most of them around 14 to 18 years of age—gravitated to Union Square, expecting to snag one of these prizes.

When few did, a riot ensued, with kids beating up kids, attacking police, and generally behaving so badly that a Code 4 situation was put in place by the cops, which is the highest level of riot security that the NYPD has—which means that the police were mobilized from across the five boroughs to quell the situation.

They were attacked with thrown bottles, construction objects like paint cans that came from a nearby contraction site, and not only were they attacked, but many in the crowd took out their frustrations on their fellow crowd members, pummeling them because they did not get what they wanted to get.

Kids climbed onto public structures, others destroyed local businesses and businessmen—one pushcart operator not only saw his business destroyed but he was physically attacked too—and if not for the work of the police, it all could have been much worse.

This co-called YouTube influencer did not have a permit for the assembly of a crowd, and the police were kind of taken by surprise by the sheer mass of people who showed up with anticipation of getting something that really wasn’t that important in the grand scheme of things.

This imbecile did show up at the site, but he—along with a few dozen other rioters—were arrested, and the YouTuber eventually was charged with incitement to riot.

The police handled this perfectly, even though they were being hit left and right with the same force that they were hit left and right with a few years ago during the George Floyd riot … err … protests.

At least way back when, the participants in that lawlessness were supposedly fighting for a cause—yes, looting and destruction and attacks to police were characterized as fighting for a “cause” by the media—

But this time, there was clearly no cause, unless you characterize personal greed and lack of responsibility a “cause,” which the media didn’t do this time, and it was so obvious why they didn’t take that low road—because it would lessen the “dynamic” of what happened during the George Floyd situation, linking the Union Square riot with a situation that the media considered “justified.”

Anyway, Mayor Adams—who in his cockiness, has been so overwhelmed by being mayor of New York City, but he cloaks it with an attitude—was, for once, so right in his appraisal of the situation.

He stated that (paraphrase) “you cannot let the Internet and social media parent your kids” and that he, himself, called his son to make sure exactly where he was at the time of the riot to make sure that his son was not part of the melee--it was not made clear if he was there or not, of course--and said that parents should regularly call and text their children to find out where they are at any given time.

Although I am not a religious person by any stretch of the imagination, the Bible warns us against false prophets and false gods, and with the Internet and social media sculpting our lives, the young are most vulnerable, because they know no other way of life than with a phone in their hands.

They do not know how to socialize in a normal pattern, they do not know how to literally do anything without a phone in their hands, and we, as parents, have used the phone as an electronic babysitter for our own kids, in particular this generation of young parents, who also know no other life without the phone.

Kids have no common sense, they cannot discern right from wrong, and they are ultra-sensitive to any pushback from anyone about their sensibilities.

Parents must seriously examine who they are to their children—parents and role models—and they must also be held responsible if their underage children get into situations like what happened on Friday afternoon in Union Squire Park.

This ”hear no evil, see no evil” attitude has got to stop, if for nothing else than for the sake of this younger generation, which right now I find to be the dumbest, weakest generation of people we have ever developed, because they have absolutely no common sense, no regard for authori8ty, and live in some netherworld where they dimply don’t know right from wrong.

And for a generation that is supposedly so in tune with their planet, so in force in slowing climate change, if you saw the aftermath of this riot, you saw more garbage strewn around the area, more than you would have if a ticker-tape parade was held there.

This helps our planet?

Ultimately I hope this YouTuber—a false prophet if there ever was one—gets the book thrown at him and that these kids somehow develop a moral compass that has nothing to do with the Internet or social media, so something like this never happens again.

And we can also hope that the media gets off their righteous plane and calls a riot a riot when it is one, no matter what the supposed “cause” is.

We can only hope.

Rant #3,183: Check It Out

Here is a completely innocuous question I have for you on this Friday morning:

Do you use the self-checkout lanes in your supermarket?

I certainly do, and I use them for a variety of reasons, including speed of exit, meaning that since I do all the scanning and bagging myself, it is simply quicker for me to do it all than wait for a cashier to do it.

That is, if a self-checkout register is open, but if I have to wait on a line to check out my groceries, I would rather wait for a self-checkout to be open than wait for a regular register to be open.

Look, I know I am buying into the philosophy that the supermarket chains have, that if people use the self-checkout lanes, why have as many cashiers on your staff if fewer people are using the traditional checkout lanes?

It is anti-employee, anti-union, anti-human being to use the self-checkout lanes, but honestly, I don’t think about the poor guy or gal sitting home without a job—or with less hours—because he or she is not needed as a cashier because of the existence of this mechanism.

I just want to get out of the store as quick as possible, and that is why I use them.

It almost makes the checkout situation a more “fun” one, because I am not only scanning the items, but placing them in the proper bags as I check out … I personally like to put all the heavier stuff—the soda, the juice and the milk—in one bag, boxes—like for cereal—in another, etc.

I can do that on the regular checkout line, but it is harder to do when the cashier is simply doing his or her job and scanning the groceries and passing them to you in no particular order.

And in New York, we have to use our own bags, so it makes it easier for me to have a plan at checkout, getting me out of the store as quickly as possible.

I write about military stores, and these stores are usually several years behind their outside-the-gate counterparts when it comes to grocery innovations.

Military stores—commissaries, which are supermarkets, and exchanges, which are department stores—have for just the past few years integrated self-checkout lanes into their stores, and hundreds of stores around the world still don’t have them, or will be getting them over the next several months.

I assume that the supermarket chains consider these lanes a success, because it helps them manage and cut payroll while they claim that they are providing a convenience to shoppers by offering them to their customers.

Certainly, if all you want to do is to buy a piece of gum, then the self-checkout lanes are the way to go—unless you have someone like me with a full grocery haul on the conveyor belt, which, obviously, is going to hold up the gum buyer for a considerable time.

(I often let people with just a few items go ahead of me, although I do remember that one time I got burned, and the one item the guy was holding ended up being many times, as he waved his family to come to the checkout, and he had numerous items to scan—and he did it without an apology yet!)

The store that I regularly do my food shopping in has about eight self-checkout lanes, so it is easier for me to make my choice about what lane I am going to.

Each one takes either cash or credit/debit cards, so I can pay however I like.

And with the eight self-checkout lanes are about six regular checkout lanes, only one of which is usually open, and sometimes two at best … again proving my point about the self-checkout lanes saving supermarkets money in personnel costs.

However, there are definitely frauds—both on purpose and not on purpose—at the self checkouts, where people do not scan items either purposely or absentmindedly, so when you add everything up, what are the self checkouts actually saving the stores when people purposely, or not on purpose, forget to scan certain items?

Anyway, do you prefer the self-checkouts or do you prefer to go to the traditional checkout lines with a human being helping you check out your groceries?

I did my food shopping yesterday morning, I went right onto a self-checkout lane, and everything was hunky dory, but the innocuous question of whether these things are worthy or not just crept into my already overloaded brain.

I like them, but do you?

Something to ponder as we go into the weekend.

Have a great weekend, and I will speak to you again on Monday.

Rant #3,182: Honesty

OK, say what you want to say about professional wrestling, but it is a global phenomenon that isn’t going away anytime soon.

There are three major pro wrestling organizations: World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE), which dwarfs the others in scope and worldwide appeal; All-Elite Wrestling (AEW),which at only four years old, has hedged into WWE’s territory and appeal using a mix of former WWE wrestlers and its own homegrown stars, sprinkled with a lot of money and TV exposure; and Impact Wrestling a distant third, but a nice alternative to the bombastic nature of the other two with some excellent performers.

Today, I would like to talk about AEW, the young upstart, and a guy that I have spoken about before, Maxwell Jacob Friedman, better known as MJF.

The one thing that all three of these organizations share is that they work real-life experiences of their stable of wrestlers into the storylines presented on these telecasts, and build upon those storylines during the lucrative pay per views that they offer fans—AEW’s are $49.99 a pop, so these PPVs are a lucrative business.

Anyway, MJF—a young 20-something from Plainview, Long Island, New York—is not only an impressive wrestler, but he has terrific microphone skills, which is almost as important as having great wrestling skills when you are trying to spin yourself to the crowd and to the home audience.

MJF has turned himself into the top villain in AEW shaping his narrative as “The Devil,” and wearing his Jewishness on his sleeve like no other Jewish wrestler has in the history of pro wrestling.

In the past, he has spoken about how it went growing up Jewish and with various learning disabilities in Plainview, a middle to upper middle class area with a large Jewish population, and MJF has told viewers time and time again that it wasn’t an easy ride for him, even when he became a coveted high school football player for JFK High School, the same high school my daughter graduated from a few years earlier.

He has done other things to highlight his Jewishness and his character as “The Devil,” including wearing a scarf around his neck that acts as kind of a stand-in for a religious “Talis” that bar mitzvah youngsters earn on the day that, at least religiously, a boy turns into a man after he reads his Haftorah.

He has had a re-bar mitzvah event right in the middle of the ring, and again, being AEW’s top villain, he portrays himself as “The Devil,” which is a Jewish stereotype that goes back generations.

But he weaves this so perfectly into his villain persona that there isn’t really a bit of anti-Semitism thrown at him; the crowd clearly gets it to the max,and he is such a “good” bad guy that he is one of the most popular of AEW’s stable of wrestlers, the guy you love to hate.

Anyway, last night—in the midst of a reboot as a good guy—he laid bare more episodes of his past, and even if you aren’t a fan, the way he handled what he said made you sit up and listen.

On yesterday’s broadcast, MJF shared that he lives with Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD), and a related syndrome called Rejection Sensitive Disorder.

According to Psychology Today (https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/friendship-20/201907/what-is-rejection-sensitive-dysphoria), that people with this disorder, or as it describes it as a dysphoria, have an emotional reaction to negative judgments, exclusion, or criticism that goes far beyond the norm.

Other people may see those with RSD as overly perfectionist, overly-sensitive, or overly reactive to even the mildest criticism.

I had never heard of this ailment, but he helped to further define his ADD and RSD by recalling a childhood incident, where other kids threw quarters at him and forced him to pick up each coin while deriding his Jewishness, an incident that he said further heightened these ailments, and a story that has remained with him for his entire life.

As he spoke, one thing led to the other, and not only did he play out his “devil” persona but in a good way, he led the crowd in chanting a negative moniker which I will not repeat here, doing it as if they were cheering for their favorite wrestler, which MJF has become because he is so good at being a bad guy.

Adam Cole, another terrific wrestler who has had his moments as one of the top heels in pro wrestling but is now a good guy, was given kudos by MJF for reforming him, and all of this led up to the two of them fighting for the AEW championship at the upcoming All-In PPV event at Wembley Stadium in London, England on August 27.

Sure, it is pure show business, pure sports entertainment, but MJF’s candor about real events in his personal life is really refreshing, and while there have been many Jewish wrestlers through the years—everyone from Goldberg to Kane—no one wears his Jewishness on his sleeve better than MJF.

To me, he IS the reason to watch AEW Wrestling each week on TNT and TBS, whether you are a pro wrestling fan or not.

With his candor, Maxwell Jacob Friedman has truly made himself into a “real” person, and that is an anomaly in pro wresting, where fake feuds and scripted storylines usually rule the roost.

Rant #3,181: Another Day

It is Wednesday, August 2, and it is the 214th day of the year.

So what do I write about in today’s column, where we are in the midst of the real dog days of summer?

I don’t know, really, but let’s go back to some other August 2 entries in years’ past to see what I wrote about.

In Rant #2,193, I pretty much said the exact same thing as I am saying today:

“Today is August 2, the 214th day of the year, and for me, it is just another day at the salt mine, another day where I wake up, get dressed, eat breakfast, go to work, work a very long day, eat lunch sometime in between, come home, eat dinner, watch a little TV, and go to sleep.

Yes, August 2 is just another day for me, and it does not stand out among the 365 days of the year.

At least it isn't a leap year this year, because then, I would have to say the same for a 366-day year.”

Well, at least I had work to go to back then, something to take my mind off of the very little that was going on at the time.

In Rant #783, in 2012, I wrote about the 59th birthday of actor Butch Patrick, best known for playing Eddie on the classic TV series "The Munsters."

So, happy birthday, Eddie … err … Butch, but can you explain to me how a vampire mother and a Frankenstein monster father produce a werewolf son?

(I already know how, but for the sake of conversation… .)

In 2017, in Rant #1,951, I wrote about the strange case of baseball's two Lee May's, one a slugger mainly for the Reds who had just passed away, and Lee Maye, with the extra 'e," who also had a solid career but also scored as a singer on a number of 45 RPM singles in the early to mid 1960s.

I don’t see any duplicate Aaron Judges or Shohei Otamis out there, not even another Ronald Acuna Jr. … although Acuna’s younger brother is a minor leaguer that the New York Mets just received in a trade.

And it all came full circle in Rant #1,724, from 2016, in "Shooting Blanks," where I spoke about sometimes having a brain cramp while writing this column five days a week.

And no, as I have said numerous times, I make absolutely no money from this blog, I do it strictly to keep my writing skills top-notch and mainly for fun.

Whatever the case, it is tough putting together these daily Rants, but honestly, it isn’t brain surgery.

Writing down my thoughts usually comes easy to me, and sometimes you will agree with me, sometimes you won’t, which is all fine and good.

But yes, sometimes I have a brain cramp, and nothing catches my fancy to write about.

I could scour my Yahoo News feed for inspiration … that news feed, on a daily basis, brings me the top news of the day, including today’s entries, like the following:

“Influencer Who Promoted Virtues of Fruit-Only Diet Dies Age 39 'Of Malnutrition'”

“Teresa Guidance and Husband Luis Ruelas Show Off Their Matching Tattoos While on the Beach”

“’We Went There To Have a Whale of a Time – a Sex Holiday, Really. But It Got Out of Hand’: Billy Idol on the Thailand Vacation That Ended With a Visit From the Army”

Heck, I know those are the major news items of the day, but I just cannot bring myself to talk about them here.

So today is just going to be one of those meandering Rants, simply because there is nothing top of mind that I feel I need to talk about.

My mother was pretty much up all night for one thing or another, I tried to sleep in between everything and kind of did, it is going to be a hot one today once again, and I expect some work to come my way over the next few hours, and I will be driving my son back and forth to work, too …

So the major part of my day is all lined up for me, and I guess that this column I just cobbled together is part of what I have lined up for myself today.

My mother’s aide just arrived, and I hope my mom has a better day today, because her night was not too good.

I guess we all have our days lined up for us, whether we realize it or not, and hopefully, everything will all work out in a positive fashion.

Rant #3,180: I'm Your Puppet

Happy August!

We are finally here into the last full month of summer.

July was a bit nicer to myself and my family than June was, but we still have a long way to go to put everything on the right track.

Maybe August will be the month.

This is a good month for my family anyway, as it is the month my son turns the ripe old age of 28, so it is a really good month to begin with.

So let’s see how the month pans out for us, and for all of us, you guys included.

Anyway, what can I talk about today?

How about the death of “Pee Wee Herman” yesterday.

Very sad indeed.

“Pee Wee Herman” was actually the alter ego of comic Paul Reubens, a nerdish character, with a dark underside, that he created in the 1970s and rode to fame in the 1980s.

The only way I can describe “Pee Wee Herman” is that he resembled a ventriloquist dummy who had come to life, with his ultra-skinny features, short-cropped hair, pink lips, and never-saw-the-sun complexion.

Hew also had that tight suit, the bow tie, and the ever-present smile and quick wit delivered in a high-pitched whine that rounded out his character.

You would have thought by looking at him that he was a real life Pinocchio—Reubens was obviously influenced by Paul Winchell’s “Jerry Mahoney” ventriloquist dummy character--but he wasn’t made of wood, he was all flesh and bones, and nobody’s hand was up his back as he made us laugh.

I remember that the first time I saw “Pee Wee Herman” was on, of all things, “The Dating Game.”

That classic game show often cast young, on-the-rise male actors and similarly on-the-rise starlets to compete for dates on the show, and Reubens was cast on an episode of the show, pitting himself against two clueless hunks.

I don’t remember if he won or lost, but he was “Pee Wee Herman” to the max on that show, and really,, the rest is history.

Later came “Pee Wee’s Playhouse,” a successful Saturday morning kids’ show that really wasn’t for kids, and it propelled him to stardom.

Adults were as eager to watch the show as kids were, but for different reasons, as Reubens injected a lot of adult humor—and attractive female supporting characters—into the show underneath and in between all of the kids-oriented material.

He went on to make a few movies as star and as a supporting actor as
“Pee Wee Herman,” but Reubens’ world blew up around him when he was arrested for lewd acts in a pornographic movie theater.

He laid low for a while, and Hollywood eventually gave him a second chance as both “Pee Wee Herman,” the character, and Paul Reubens, the actor.

He appeared as the actor in a couple of movies, including one of the Batman films, and he turned up here and there as the character, as nebbishly as ever.

But Reubens never reached his previous heights, a nd now we learned yesterday that in real life, he lost a battle to cancer at age 70.

So even the character “Pee Wee Herman” could not avoid a sad, real-life end.

R.I.P.