Rant #3,617: The End

This might be the shortest Rant of all time.

Israel must OK the latest truce proposal.

I know, they do not trust Hamas--for good reason--and Hamas certainly does not trust them.

I also know that as a democracy, the truce must go through a number of Israeli political channels before it wins approval ... just like what happens here when proposed legislation runs up and down the gauntlet of the Senate and House.

But if you think Israel looks bad on the world stage now--unfairly, very unfairly--if this thing does not go through, Israel will look even worse, even if they have every justification in the world for not agreeing with it.

Let the terrorists demonstrate how truly subhuman they really are--don't tie the noose around their necks, let them do it themselves.

The hostages need this thing to go through, and certainly their families do, too.

Don't let extreme right wingers threaten you ... Bibi, see that this goes through.

Give peace a chance--

Real peace, and if the terrorists feel they are not bound by this agreement, you then have every right to back out.

Don't do it now, when peace is thisclose.

Don't give anybody any reason to paint you as the villain.

You aren't ...

But you will look like one if this truce doesn't go through.

In my heart, I believe it will only be briefly delayed, and it will take hold maybe a day or two after it was originally set for.

I want to believe that; don't let the hostages continue to rot away, and do not disappoint their families.

Time IS NOT on your side.

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

Rant #3,616: is It Really Real?

Just let me say that as far as my son and his job situation, we have done just about everything we could right now to help him with his job search.

It is a waiting game now, and I thank all for their concern.

Onto other matters ...

And now we supposedly have a ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas.

It is interesting to see how the initial coverage of this supposed deal has been handled by the three networks.

I initially watched CBS, and while they did a good job explaining the whys and wherefores of the supposed deal, they tended to focus more on the 47,000 Palestinians who lost their lives during the 15-month war, where NBC gave broader coverage, not only longer in time but more talk about the hostages ... several of whom are American citizens 

And on ABC, the coverage was even longer in time, and even had reporters on the ground in Israel covering what was happening at 8 p.m. Tel Aviv time.

We know that this agreement will roll out in phases ... but let's be honest about it, when you are dealing with terrorists like Hamas, you have to take everything with the proverbial grain of salt.

And as for the Palestinians ... remember, Hamas was voted in as leaders by the Palestinians themselves, so they are not to be trusted either.

The remarkable thing--and something that might not get the acknowledgment that it deserves--is that reports are that the teams of President Biden and Incoming-President Trump actually worked together--with teams from Egypt and Qatar--to get this thing moving.

Two presidents--one outgoing, the other incoming--working together like this is virtually unheard of, and they simply chucked the Democratic and Republican tags to get this done--simply because it was the right thing to do.

(However, Trump later said that the deal would not have gotten done without the participation of his team ... and he is probably right about that.)

What will come next is anyone's guess.

But one thing is for sure--

All the hostages must be released, all the remains of the hostages must be returned to the tamilies for proper burial--

And if not, it is on the heads of the negotiators to rectify this.

Yes, skepticism abounds, because you simply cannot trust terrorists--

PERIOD.

But if this thing plays out, it is clear that Israel has reached its objectives to a point, and that Hamas--or what is left of it--really had no choice but to agree to this ceasefire.

Hamas showed its true colors in this war, as did the world and its continued anti-semitism and anti-Israel rhetoric.

If the supposedly civilized world would have gotten together right at the get go to put up a united front against these subhuman terrorists, none of what ensued would have ever happened.

Let's remember that, even as we rejoice on this ceasefire.

And let's continue to--

"Never Forget."

Rant #3,615: Help!

We learned yesterday that my son's job has virtually been eliminated.

He is a part-time worker working four days/16 hours a week, and it has been cut down to one day and four hours.

He is developmentally disabled, and finding another job is going to be difficult at best, as it was difficult finding this one.

My son has been working since he was 15 years of age, and at age 29, he has done a variety of jobs, all part time.

His current position is in an office setting, and I would love for him to continue in an office, where he can learn new skills, but beggars can't be choosers.

Really, if there is a position in Eastern Nassau County or Western Suffolk County, that would be great.

He cannot drive, but I will be his transportation, as I have been.

He has a resume and cover letter. 

Please, if you know of anything, let me know. 

This has hit my family hard, as ironically, we were going to ask his work for an increase in hours; now, just the opposite has happened.

We went through hell getting him this job, and he wouldn't have it if it wasn't for a guardian angel who helped us.

And then the pandemic came, and he lost his job a little after I lost mine, and I spent a huge amount of time looking for both of us.

When the pandemic settled, I went back to his old workplace, and he was rehired.

And if you were thinking like I was, no, they say it has nothing to do with the unemployment rate going up; it has to do with the lack of work that is available to him in his workplace.

I do believe them, but the coincidence is kind of interesting.

Whatever the case, he is heartbroken, my wife and I are upset, and we are back at square one, just like we were a few years ago.

It seems the black cloud over my family just continues its wretched path.We surmount one problem, and before we can take a deep breath, another problem arises.

And I thought 2025 would be a good year ... !

He has worked since age 15, and I just know that he would be a good fit somewhere ...

Where that "somewhere" is, I don't really know.

Can anyone help?

Rant #3,614: No Anchovies Please

I just discovered that this week is National Pizza Week.

I guess you celebrate by getting a pie at your local pizza parlor ... but not at those national chains like Domino's ... which is sacrilege to begin with.

Over the past 60 years, pizza has become our collective national food obsession.

Everyone loves pizza, and the variations are endless. Me, I like mine traditional, or with meatball as the topping.

And you just know that any neighborhood pizza place has to be infinitely better than what you can get at the national places, in particular in the state that is the true home of the best pizza in the United States--

New York.

There is no better pizza than New York pizza, and the crust and the cheese--and the water--make New York City pizza, in particular, the best pizza that there is.

Here on Long Island, the pizza isn't as good as what you can get in the city, but it is, in my estimation, just a notch below what you can get in the five boroughs.

Pizza is sort of like bagels--

You can get them anywhere, but the original ethnicity of these foods make New York the true mecca of both of them.

And the national chains, for each, simply cannot compare with what the local.places put out.

I remember vividly the first time I ever had pizza

It must have been 1962 or so, and my uncle--my mother's brother--took me into Greenwich Village, which, at the time, was one of the few places you could get pizza in New York City.

He bought me my first slice, and that was the beginning of a more than 60-year love affair with pizza.

This infatuation continued during my adolescence, as when we lived in Rochdale Village, South Jamaica, Queens, New York, the first mall had absolutely the best pizza I ever ate, at King George Pizza.

If I remember correctly, you could get two slices and a soda for 75 cents ... and garlic knots were free!

How times have changed ... we found a pretty good pizza place near where we live, and the pizzas there are about $20 apiece!

Sometimes, I make pizza at home, using pre-made Boboli for the crust and putting on top whatever I want.

It is OK in a pinch, but you have to get your pizza from a real pizza parlor to get real pizza.

So happy National Pizza Week to everyone, and I wish that a nice slice of New York pizza finds its way onto your plate sometime this week.

Yes, that's a real slice of life, for sure!

Rant #3,613: I'd Like To Get To Know You (Again)

I was having a conversation with a woman at my son's basketball.league on Friday night, and we were talking about the current state of television.

The last thing she said to me about this was, "There is a lot of garbage on TV right now," and I really couldn't agree with her more.

There are plenty of choices, but personally, I simply cannot get into any of them.

And with so much of what they call "entertainment" literally infested with Hollywood woke nonsense, really, when I want to be entertained, I generally do not like being spoken down to by multimillionaires who think they know better than average Joe's do.

And that goes triple for the movies, which aren't worth the price of admission.

I don't really watch much TV anymore, except for the news shows--local and national--and sports (I have Verizon, so st least right now, I don't have any carriage issues).

So what does a guy like me do when he wants to watch TV and there is literally nothing on to watch?

One of these abysses is during the week at 7:30 p.m., after the news shows are over and right before the abysmal prime-time schedule rears its head.

So what do my wife and I watch at 7:30 p.m. during the week?

We mix old and new into one package by watching the Our Gang/Little Rascals series, from beginning to end.

We started watching the series--which spanned the silent era in the early 1920s to the war era of the early 1940s--and produced about 220 episodes, or short features ranging from 10 minutes to 30 minutes in length.

The series--the brain child of controversial filmmaker Hal Roach--also spawned a few legitimate spinoffs, some not-so-legitimate ones, and really is the bellwether of how children are featured on TV and in the movies.

Yes, the series is very controversial--some of its imagery related to blacks is very questionable--but it was perhaps the first entertainment series to show the races on somewhat equal footing.

Anyway, I found that each of the episodes--including the silent ones--are available all around the Internet, and when we want to watch one of these shorts--which were originally shown in movie theaters but migrated to TV in the early 1950s--I simply cast it to my TV, and we have some legitimate viewing to keep us entertained.

Now before you say, "You must have seen each of these shorts 1,000 times," think again.

First of all, even in the 1950s and 1960s, many of these shorts were sheared of their more controversial elements--believe it or not, not just related to its depiction of blacks, but also of Asians, Jews and the mentally ill--so oftentimes we are seeing these shorts intact for the very first time.

And some were banned entirely from TV, so it's the first time my wife and I have seen these shorts either in decades or ever.

Second, the shorts are pretty much divided into three packages, and viewers pretty much only saw the second package way back when.

The first package featured only the silent episodes--starring Joe Cobb, Mickey Daniels and a few others who migrated to the talkies in the early 1930s--and I know that on New York TV, these were rarely televised.

The second package features the most well- known and televised shorts in the series, featuring Chubby Chaney, Farina Hoskins. Jackie Cooper and Stimey Beard, and later, Spanky McFsrland, Alfalfa Switzer, Buckwheat Thomas, Butch Bond, Porky Lee and Darla Hood.

The third package is the generally highly inferior and rarely shown MGM shorts, initially featuring Spanky, Alfalfa, Butch, Porky, Darla and Buckwheat and later adding Froggy Laughlin and Mickey Gubitosi, aka Robert Blake.

So, as you can see, a major chunk of these shorts have either not been seen by my wife and I or maybe we have seen some of them once or twice.

Anyway, watching these shorts gives us a good, short education each evening on not just Hollywood during those 20 years, but American life in general during those years.

Many are poignant, heartfelt vignettes of the time, others are as full of slapstick as the Three Stooges shorts are, and some of the later ones are morality plays or are firmly geared to the war effort.

And yes, we laugh, we giggle, we often grimace, and we take it all in. I mean, some of these shorts are nearing 100 years old!

(As an aside, I met Spanky about 35 years ago or so, and he was as engaging in person as he was on screen.)

Since we began watching these shorts in December, we are now approaching the end of the series. I have seen the last two episodes in the past, and while they are pretty bad, I look forward to seeing them again.

We need to watch a couple of the silents, and then we can watch the legitimate spinoffs, including "General Spanky," a feature-length film that incredibly, actually stars Buckwheat!

There are a couple of other spinoffs to watch--Hal Roach tried to start the series up again in the late 1940s with two hour-long features with a completely different set of kid characters, and there was also "The Boyfriends," series of short films featuring the early Gang members as teens--and if we really want to stretch it, we can watch the rip-off Mickey McGuire series ... which is godawful, but brought the world Mickey Rooney and Shirley Temple.

And if you think this is all too old hat for you, let me add that right before Christmas, there was a brand new, 400-page biography released on Alfalfa! It is a bit pricey, but when the cost comes down, I will probably get it

So the interest in the series remains as high as it always has been.

Anyway, that is what my wife and I watch each night ... and you can probably hear us laughing wherever you are if you try.

Thus is REAL entertainment, not the trash we are being fed by Hollywood today.

"Chubsy Ubsy" indeed!

Rant #3,612: More, More, More

So President-Elect Donald Trump wants to make Greenland into the country's 51st state--claiming that it is in our best security interests to do so-- even though the territory is part of the kingdom of Denmark, and has not demonstrated any willingness to sell its possession to our, or any other, country.

He also wants the Panama Canal, and he has threatened that if he decides it is in our best interests to obtain both areas, he might be willing to send in our military to do so.

Trump also wants to change the name "Gulf of Mexico" to "Gulf of America."

Honestly, I don't know if he can actually do any of the things he has been talking about, but even this type of talk--which many might think is more of his yabbering about nothing--might actually be based on what is happening globally.

I think he believes that even just talk of these things will put a bug in the heads of the leaders of Russia and China, who might have expansion plans of their own.

He wants them to understand that the U.S. is closely watching what they are doing, and that the U S. can do it, too, if necessary.

I know these plans sound crazy, but it is as crazy as Russia sucking up the Ukraine and China suckong up Taiwan, so if his plans are out of left field, maybe Russia and China's plans were just as crazy a few years ago ... but not out of the question now.

As for the Gulf of Mexico or Gulf of Anerica talk, I think with tarrifs dancing around in his head, and with the border on his mind, I think he believes that this change is a necessary one.

Will he also want to change New Mexico to New America?

Only the Shadow knows, or maybe your hairdresser knows for sure.

I guess that you can politely say that our new president is forward thinking, but many would say that he is delusional.

Personally, I think it is a mix of the two, if that is possible.

But before he goes forward with these ideas, our new president has a major black hole on his plate, as he is going to inherit the problem with the California wildfires. 

What a horrible situation ... and let's stop focusing on all the Hollywood stars and very wealthy people who have lost their homes there, as the media seems to be doing.

Let's focus on the everyman, the average Americans who lost everything ... and are going to have trouble managing with the limited resources they have at their disposal.

Look, it is horrible that anyone has to go through this, but the stars will rebuild, or at least have other places to take refuge in.

The everyman has nothing, and even though I feel for people like James Woods and Billy Crystal, I am more concerned about the average guy who really and truly lost everything.

Why the media continues to focus on the Hollywood multimillionaires is beyond my comprehension.

Or maybe it isn't.

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

Rant #3,611: I Could Write a Book

You might have noticed that I haven't put up any succeeding chapters of my fledgling novel lately.

I haven't put anything up, not purposely, but one thing or another has gotten me in the way of making these chapters available.

Well, I am going to fix that today, by presenting not one, but two chapters for your reading pleasure.

Again, this is a novel geared to young adults, and I really need some feedback as to whether I should pursue this and put it into book form one way or the other.

There are a number of ways I can do this, but it is probably going to cost me some money if I do decide to publish it.

Self-publishing isn't cheap, but that might just be the way fir me to go with this.

So without further ado, here are the next two chapters of my novel.

Please let me know whst you think.

14

Abraham Lincoln Panim kept his scarf on for the first few weeks of classes, and when asked why he continued to wear his scarf, he said that he had a cold, or that he was cold, or he gave any other excuse he could provide so that the inquirer was at least somewhat satisfied with the answer.

He pretty much kept to himself, so the inquiries weren’t that many, and that made it easier for him to wear his scarf during classes.

He was also doing very well in his classes, getting mainly A’s on all of his work.

In between classes, Abraham Lincoln Panim went where most of his fellow students went, to the cafeteria to take a break and to maybe have a cup of coffee or eat a sandwich.

As was his norm, Abraham Lincoln Panim went to the cafeteria, ordered a cup of coffee, and sat alone at a table in the back of the massive room. He took out his books and studied them, and there generally was no one around him, as most students on their break sat with others further up in the room.

One day, Abraham Lincoln Panim followed the same protocol, but for the first time, he saw a group of fellow students, both male and female, pulling up some chairs to a nearby table and sitting directly opposite him.

“Hey, Abie, why don’t you sit with us?” one boy yelled out to him.

Not ever remembering when he was ever called “Abie”—and not liking it one bit--Abraham Lincoln Panim briefly looked up from his book.

“Well … I am into studying for that test we have in English tomorrow … I would like to, but I need to bone up on a few things,” he replied.

“We’ll give you a couple of things to bone up on!” the boy replied, pointing to a girl who was sitting with him at the table, who Abraham Lincoln Panim recognized as being the blind girl who spoke with him while he waited on line during his first day at school. “You can bone up on her!”

The girl pushed the boy away, but he continued what he had to say.

“Hey Abie, why do you wear that scarf all the time? You cannot possibly be sick anymore. I am sure you are a very handsome guy, and I am sure the girls will love you if you just get rid of the scarf.”

Abraham Lincoln Panim briefly looked up, but he did not respond.

Then the boy asking all the questions came over to him, and directly addressed him.

“C’mon, Abie, let everyone look at you and see what you look like!”

Before Abraham Lincoln Panim could do anything, the boy grabbed his scarf, and began to pull it. Abraham Lincoln Panim tried to hold back the pulling, but in a few seconds, the scarf was off, and all eyes in the cafeteria were on him.

“Ha! ‘Eddie Munster’ is back!” the boy yelled, as everyone saw Abraham Lincoln Panim without his scarf, with his rat face in view. “Remember me, Abie?”

In horror and trying to cover his face, Abraham Lincoln Panim looked up at the boy, and who he was came into clear focus to him—it was the same boy who taunted him in school years earlier, Brandon Hartung, the boy who years earlier had poured Cheez Whiz all over him to make fun of his rat face. And he still wore a glove on his right hand.

As seemingly everyone in the cafeteria was laughing at him, Brandon Hartung ran back to his table, took a slice of pizza with his left hand, and rubbed it--including both the sauce and cheese--all over Abraham Lincoln Panim’s head.

Abraham Lincoln Panim, with laughs cascading from one end of the cafeteria to another, got his things, picked up his scarf from the floor, and ran out of the cafeteria as quickly as he could. He ran all the way home.

Abraham Lincoln Panim never attended college again in person.

15

When he explained to his mother what had happened, Mrs. Panim tried to console her son.

“Look, it was my fault,” she said to him that night. “I … I thought that people in college would be a little more open to everybody, no matter who they were, where they came from—“

“But not for a rat-faced boy like me,” Abraham Lincoln Panim said. “Mom, please don’t blame yourself. I guess that I am … I guess too different, with my rat face. That has nothing to do with you.”

No walks were taken that night. Abraham Lincoln Panim was devastated. He went into his bed, shut off his light, and tossed and turned as he tried to sleep.

Once he did finally fall asleep, he had some terrible dreams that night, experiencing what had happened to him over and over and over, until he woke up in a cold sweat.

Abraham Lincoln Panim thought to himself, “Let me go to the bathroom. Let me put some cold water on my face, and then maybe I can get back to sleep.”

This happened for days, if not weeks. Abraham Lincoln Panim never slept through the night, hounded by his nightmares.

In the meantime, Mrs. Panim arranged with the school to have her son take his classes at home. Class work was sent to his house via special delivery, he would do the work, and then whatever he did was sent back to the teacher for grading.

He took all his tests at home, and was able to complete his coursework in about two years. Mrs. Stottle helped him with some things, but he generally did all the coursework himself.

At age 20, Abraham Lincoln Panim received his bachelor of arts degree in the mail. He did not attend any ceremonies, although his mother and Mrs. Stottle arranged a little party for him when he received his diploma.

“Son, you have done a great job getting that diploma,” Mrs. Panim said. “And you really earned it, studied hard, and you have made me so, so proud.”

She then brought out a big ice cream cake with the inscription “Congratulations to the Graduate!” and placed it on a table in the living room, and Mrs. Stottle began to cut the cake.

“You have done a great job,” Mrs. Stottle said, but she looked wobbly as she cut the cake.

She fell backward on the floor, and with his mom trying to revive the older woman, Abraham Lincoln Panim called 911.

The EMTs came and put Mrs. Stottle on a stretcher as his ice cream graduation cake melted off the table and dripped onto the floor.