Rant #3,070: No Time

It is Thursday, February 9, and it is just like any other Thursday for me.

I woke up, took a shower, got dressed, brought in the garbage pail, retrieved the newspaper, and sat down and ate breakfast and started to read the newspaper.

I soon have to wake up my son for work, and while he gets ready for his day, I will finish up what I do in the early morning and prepare to take him to work.

After I drive him to work, I go straight to the supermarket, where I buy my groceries for the week. My wife, who is at work herself, gave me the list of what we need and I try to follow it to the letter.

I buy all the groceries we need, and I take them home, put them where they belong, check to see what work has come in for me, and somehow squeeze lunch into this busy day.

After lunch and hopefully after I finish my work, I drive out to pick up my son from work, and then I take him to do his own shopping.

Then we go home, and I look over the mail, for both my family and my mother, who simply cannot do this anymore, and while I do this, my son puts away what he has bought, and I then do any residual work that I did not finish earlier. My wife has arrived home from her work, and she is starting to prepare dinner for the three of us.

We eat dinner, and after having checked up periodically through the day with my mother to see how she is doing, I meet with her again after I eat, and usually spend about 20 minutes to a half hour with her.

After I leave her, I watch a little TV with my wife, and then my son, and then I usually fall asleep watching TV with my son, and I somehow make it to the bed, and I am done for the day.

And then I start it all up again on Friday.

But the last few days have been a bit different for me—not a major difference, but something a wee bit different nonetheless--because for the first time in decades, I have done all of these things without wearing a wristwatch on my left wrist.

This does not seem like a monumental change, but for me, it is.

I have worn a watch since I was about five or six years old. I think I originally did it because I thought it made me feel more mature, older than I was … and you know how kids always want to feel older than they really are.

But then it simply became a necessity.

When I was roaming the grounds of my neighborhood in the sprawling community of Rochdale Village, South Jamaica, Queens,NewYork, you could still go from one end of the community to another without your mother knowing exactly where you were.

But if she was preparing supper for the family—she, my sister and I, and my father would eat later when he came home from work—I had better be where I was supposed to be—at home—at that time, or I would hear about it, and hear about it but good.

And as I grew older, I simply needed to see what time it was as part of my regular progression of the day.

And I have worn a watch on my left wrist for probably nearly 60 years now, and me not being a jewelry person, it is the only such thing I ever wore on my person.

I have had many watches over the years—fun and functional and both at the same time—but when they broke or did not run anymore, I seemed to always have a replacement ready to go.

But in the current time, my watch simply stopped working, and after seeing that it was one of those watches where it would be difficult to get the battery out to change it—if that was the actual problem—I decided to ditch it and get a new watch.

The watch I had I had purchased right at the beginning of the pandemic. Back three years ago, I went to the local Walmart when my then-current watch had also died, and was really lucky.

If you remember,Walmart was one of the few stores open during those early days, and myself and maybe 20 other people—total, including workers--were in the store.

I went through watch after watch—looking for one that had a backlight and also was waterproof—and after going through about 100 watches, I found one—only one—that fit that criteria, and that was the one that I had on my wrist when it died last week.

So I went back to Walmart, thinking I would be so lucky this time, but lo and behold, their watch section had diminished by about half from three years ago, and nothing fit my needs.

I went to Target, and the once bustling watch department was no more. They had few men’ watches scattered about, but they were cheap and did not meet my needs, so I still had no watch.

(I have heard that wristwatches have become almost passé because everyone has a cellphone, and can look up the time using that device, or if people have a watch, it is a smart watch, hooked up to the Internet and able to do so many other things than tell time, but guess I am old fashioned, and all I want is a traditional wristwatch.)

I decided to order a watch online, and I found the perfect one on Amazon, under the male watches banner, one that fit all my parameters.

I ordered it, received it in the mail a day and a half later, but to my astonishment, it was a male watch all right—one for a little boy. It was so small that I could barely see its face, and I could barely get it on my wrist.

So, still no watch.

Totally frustrated, I went to the Kohl’s site, found another watch that I felt was way overpriced but met my needs, and I ordered it—but I received a message back telling me that while my order would be filled, that I should expect delays, and that the watch would come to me not in a week or so, but most probably by the end of the month.

So here I am, without a watch for some time now, and the white spot on my wrist—where all the watches covered up my skin from the sun for decades—is beginning to get a little darker without a watch over it.

Sure, this is not a big problem, but I keep on looking at my now bare wrist for the time, and all I see is skin.

What time is it?

Rant #3,069: No

“Dear NBA Commissioner Adam Silver:

Enough is enough.

I know that you are a busy man, but did you notice that Kyrie Irving deleted his Instagram post where he apologized for putting up a link to a film that featured one anti-Semitic trope after another?

Remember, earlier this season, Irving put up this link, and then pretty much refused to show any remorse for doing so?

His team at the time, the Brooklyn Nets—playing in the New York City borough with one of the largest Jewish populations not only in the country, but in the world—suspended him, forced him to take classes to understand the Jewish experience, and fined him … but he still never apologized.

Then he finally put up this message, and this instance was pretty much put in the rear-view mirror.

NBA players generally backed Irving during this entire period, not saying one world about how hurtful his post was, and denying his anti-Semitism.

Well, what do you say now after his press conference introducing him to his new team, the Dallas Mavericks?

Not only did he reveal that he had deleted that post—brushing it off by saying that he often deleted such posts—but he also stated that he felt “disrespected” in Brooklyn, with his talent never appreciated.

First of all, you, Mr. Silver, as a Jewish human being yourself, should have seen how gimpy his apology was.

It was obviously written and/or orchestrated by his agent and/or his employer, and all he had to do was post it—and not believe a world in it at all—just to move on from this incident that the player caused himself with his original post.

Second, not only was his “apology” gimpy, but the NBA’s reaction to it wasn’t really was quite questionable, but was as lame as his apology was.

Irving should have been suspended for the rest of the year, or at least for more than the eight-game suspension that he was given.

In a league that wholeheartedly supports the Black Lives Matter organization, if the shoe were on the other foot, and a white player put up a similar link to a film showing blacks in such a bad light, you just know that there would have been more of an uproar than that surrounded Irving’s post.

More importantly, you should have enacted a league-wide edict that every player in the league had to take sensitivity training when it came to their relationship with the Jewish population—a population that has supported the NBA since Day One.

In fact, if it weren’t for Jews, there would be no NBA.

As I think you know, the majority of players in the early days of the league, more than 70 years ago, were Jewish, and to this day, a good percentage of the league’s owners are Jewish—and Irving’s new team is, in fact, owned by a Jew, Mark Cuban.

And YOU are Jewish.

You would think that there would have been more of a punishment for Irving, but I guess when you score 27 points a game, little things like anti-Semitism don’t really matter.

Irving is far from the only current NBA and former NBA player who has demonstrated anti-Semitism, including everyone from Stephen Jackson to Dwyane Wade to Kevin Durant to Allan Iverson to Meyers Leonard … sure, the intent of each one of these incidents perhaps was different, but in a league that stands up for the “downtrodden”—blacks, women, the LGBTQ community—the silence on the Kyrie Irving matter was deafening.

And how could it be that there was just one voice in the wilderness to point out how deafening this silence really was?

Only one former player, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, saw the indignation of the NBA’s silence over the Kyrie Irving situation, saying that it does not run true in a league that supports Black Lives Matter so strongly.

Does the silence stem from the view of many blacks—including NBA players, the majority of whom are black—that Jews are simply a fringe element of the white race, and thus, they don’t deserve their sympathy because wile Jews are actually part of the “problem,” because they are white people?

I just don’t know, but I want to conclude this message to you in a way that perhaps you will understand.

I have been going to NBA games since my father took me to the old Madison Square Garden to see an NBA doubleheader—remember those?—way back in 1965. There were few people in attendance, but I had the time of my life at my first NBA game.

I have continued to attend NBA games to the present time, and I followed up my father taking me to games by taking my own son to games both at MSG, Barclays Center and at other arenas in the country.

As the Kyrie Irving incident unfolded, and I saw the lack of response from the NBA and its players to this oblivious instance of anti-Semitism, I declared that I would never go to an NBA game again.

I have been going to games for roughly more than a half century, but I cannot support a league that does not support me, as a Jewish American.

And now, with Irving’s deletion of his supposedly apologetic post, I clearly see that the NBA doesn’t care about me, my son, my deceased father and every other Jewish fan that it has had since 1948.

You have lost me, lost my money, and lost my interest.

I would be happy to discuss this with you at greater length at your convenience."

Rant #3,068: Bits and Pieces

In an unprecedented move for the Ranting and Raving Blog, for the first time in 3,068 posts, we are going to have a “Bits and Pieces” entry two days in a row.

This never happened before, and may never happen again, so bask in its glow while you can.

There are a few more stories that do not deserve full entry observation that I wanted to talk about yesterday, but could not fit in to yesterday’s piece, so they moved over to today.

It is something very unusual, but without further ado, here goes nothing—

Dead Woman Sent to Funeral Home, But Isn’t Dead: This may go down as one of the stranger stories of the year, but it did happen.

The other day, a supposedly dead 82 year auld woman who was in a Long Island nursing home was sent to a nearby funeral home to be burred, but upon further examination, it was found that she was alive and breathing.

The questions are many: why was she thought to be dead?; did a doctor thoroughly examine her and declare her to be deceased; and what exactly happened to awaken her from her stupor and return her to the living?

Look, she probably isn’t well, but I am sure that these are questions that her family is asking both the nursing home and the funeral home, and it was announced yesterday that the district attorney will be getting involved, too.

And was she ever pronounced officially and unequivocally dead by a doctor? I am sure that doctor will be questioned, and he or she better have some good answers, or I am sure he or she will lose their medical license for awhile.

On the TV news last night, one doctor having nothing to directly do with this case was interviewed, and talked about one of the possible reasons that the woman came to life again.

It might be this reason or it might not, but it appears to be plausible—although even if this did happen, there are questions about whether the doctor who supposedly declared her dead—if one actually did—did what he or she did with a thorough examination.

It seems that there are rare instances where a person could be dead for a very short period of time, but then the brain somehow reinvigorates itself, and when that happens, the entire body reinvigorates itself, including initiating blood flow and lung capacity once again, which means the heart starts pumping after it had stopped.

This does happen—the brain can lay dormant in certain cases, and perhaps was started up again by a variety of circumstances, even in the ambulance or whatever vehicle was used to transport the body to the funeral home—but it is a rare occurrence.

So whatever happened to revive this woman to some state of being alive, it happened, and can you imagine the shock of the funeral home employee who discovered that this dead body was actually alive?

School Bus Stop Sign Stops Traffic Until Drivers Get Wise: This is something that happened to me on Friday, and in my more than 48 years of being a legal driver, I can’t ever remember it happening to me before this particular incident.

As I was driving my son to work on Friday, I noticed a yellow school bus pulled over to the side of the road with its flashers and Stop sign out, meaning that all traffic on both sides of the road had to stop until the bus was done letting off its passenger(s) and the flashers and Stop sign retracted.

That is the procedure in New York State, and I have to say that I have followed this rule to the letter since it was put in place several years ago.

Anyway, as I approached the stopped school bus and stopped my car—and saw in front of me that other cars simply went through the flashers and Stop sign and were on their way as they broke the state law—I also saw that I wasn’t the only one following the law, as the car in the right lane also stopped as did cars on the other side of the road.

I was the first car in the left lane, so everyone stopped behind me, and all of us were waiting for the flashers and Stop sign to recede so we could be on our way.

This usually takes maybe a minute or a minute and a half to do, but I—and drivers on the other side of the street—discovered that for some reason, this retraction was taking longer than anticipated.

On the other side of the street, after about three minutes, cars started to move again, but since I was the first car in the left lane, I wanted to make sure that everything was safe to move on.

After about five minutes of sitting there, I inched up a little bit past the Stop sign, and although I admittedly did not get out of my car to get a better view, I noticed that from may standpoint, there was no one in the bus, even though the flashers and Stop sign were still on.

Whoever was driving the bus had pulled over for whatever reason, but did not shut off the flashers and Stop sign for whatever reason, so even though we all stopped as we should have been, I discovered that there really wasn’t any reason to do so.

I waved everyone on, and we all drove past the stopped bus.

Now I know that some of these buses also have cameras, and if this is one of them, the camera will show that I—and about 30 or 40 cars behind me in both lanes—went past the flashers and the Stop sign on the bus.

But this time it was warranted, since we sat there following the rules for at least five minutes, and I hope that I do not get a ticket for going past this bus.

If I do get a ticket, this is one to fight, but on the other hand, the only proof I have that there was no one on the bus at the time was my own eyesight.

In fact, the bus driver should be the one fined, for not retracting the flashers and Stop sign—and thus, holding up traffic on both sides of a busy roadway—when he wasn’t even in the vehicle.

Let’s see what happens, but whatever the case, I know I did the right thing.

It Was Three Degrees, and Now, It is 53 Degrees … and Counting: The weather is just so strange in my neck of the woods.

On Saturday, when I woke up at about 6 a.m. it was all of three degrees on the thermometer, and after a scant snowfall last week, I thought that we had finally hit winter after an extremely mild stretch that had it feeling like spring through December and January and into early February.

But then, the next day, the temperature had catapulted to a balmy 43 degrees, and yesterday, it was 53 degrees, with the next week and a half forecast to be in the upper 40s and into the 50s.

This has been one of the mildest winners on record in my neck of the woods, and believe me, I am not complaining, as other areas have really been hit with horrid weather.

But it is funny; when will it finally be winter over here?

Let me quote the singing group that has an appropriate name in lieu of what I just spoke about—The Three Degrees—when I bring up one of their biggest hits in my question to Mother Nature about the lack of winter we have had thus far:

“When Will I See You Again?”

That is it for me today.

I can retire “Bits and Pieces” for another day after doing an uncharacteristic back-to-back.

Speak to you again tomorrow … but no more “Bits and Pieces” for now.

Rant #3,067: Bits and Pieces

Yes, it is time for another “Bits and Pieces” Blog post.

There are a few things that I want to talk about, but none of them deserve a full column’s view, so this format is better for me to voice my thoughts on a couple of issues.

So let’s begin the week with “Bits and Pieces.”

Here goes—

U.S. Shoots Down Chinese Spy Balloon: Does anyone really understand why this took so long to do, given the supposed facts that have been reported?

This spy balloon entered our environs last week, and had been buzzing around the midsection of our country for several days when finally, its mission was aborted when we shot the thing down.

I have several questions that have yet to be answered by anyone in our government:

How did this spy balloon enter our air space undetected?

Why was it allowed to continue on its course,, much of it over military installations, for as long as it did?

What data did it collect while it was flying around, and has whatever it collected been relayed back to China before it was finally obliterated?

Heck, the President of the United States doesn’t even have these answers and is bewildered as the rest of us are, as he had asked that the balloon be shot down days ago, and then was told that it couldn’t be shot down over land, as the debris could fall to the ground and put civilians in peril.

If you believe that, I have a bridge to sell you … or at least stock in a balloon company.

So we let this thing wander around our air space for a couple of days, gather whatever information it was sent here to gain, and then, after several days, we blow it out of the air?

Wouldn’t it have been a better plan if we got this thing out of the air before it was able to gather any information?

Again, I don’t think even the President understood all of this, and we are led to believe that he had had enough, and finally gave the word as our commander in chief that when the balloon was over water it would be removed, and that is exactly what happened.

We have people looking for the debris, but what damage has already been wrought by this thing which China called an “errant weather balloon” ,,, yes, one that was errant for thousands and thousands of miles and just happened to wander into our air space.

I think Americans need to not only question the Chinese for their tactics but question our own government about what the real reason is that it took so long to shoot this thing down from the sky.

Kyrie Irving Leaves Nets For Mavericks in a Trade He Demanded To Be Made: Late Friday afternoon, the basketball cancer known as Kyrie Irving demanded a trade from the Brooklyn Nets—who have coddled him through non-compliance with coronavirus shot indifference, anti-Semitic behavior and a whole lot of other bizarre instances—and they sent him to the Dallas Mavericks.

I wish the Mavs good luck, because they are going to really, really need it.

This basketball cancer—who has burned bridges in Cleveland, Boston and now Brooklyn—has more baggage than a busy train porter, and while he also has a world of talent, he is his own worst enemy, and he doesn’t really understand that what he says and does is so unprofessional and quite frankly, strange.

Kyrie Irving may now play for Dallas, but in actuality, he is an entity playing for himself.

He has no clue what being a team player is and leaves every organization he has been with in tatters because of his own crazy behavior.

The Nets might not be better on the court with this trade—which will certainly lead to Kevin Durant wondering what he got himself into in Brooklyn—but off the court, they have improved their situation 1 million percent by getting rid of this wart.

Another One of My Friends Enters “The Old Fogey Club”: I went to a 65th birthday party for a dear friend yesterday, and it was a really fun time for all, in particular this friend, who now joins me in this aforementioned “club.”

Baby boomers—once the young guns who were going to change the world and actually did do just that in many, many ways—are now the oldsters, and many of us are 65 years of age and beyond that number in 2023.

It is not easy being a member of this club, in particular when the news media looks at people over 50 years of age as being ancient.

But as Baby Boomers continue to mature, they will have to deal with us in one way or the other, but it remains a difficult task to realize that those of a certain age are now looked at as being old and decrepit.

My friend will be fine. He still has his job as a teacher, and he can pretty much write his own ticket as to how long he wants to continue to do this—he earned that right years ago.

But some of us “Old Fogeys” also earned that right, and also earned it years ago, but will not ever be able to exercise whatever benefits that right gives you, and those are the people that need the most help, because society isn’t going to bend over backwards to help such people.

And that is a real shame, because those people still have so much to offer the world … but go explain that to people who are in decision-making positions who are about half your age, if even that.

And that is the real “Old Fogey Club,” those of us who have been put into unnecessary and unwarranted shackles by people who claim to understand and to respect us, but prove that talk is cheap by stereotyping us as being on our death beds and won’t give us a break.

Shame on them all.

So that is the end of this installment of “Bits and Pieces.”

And this “Old Fogey” will speak to you again on Tuesday.

Rant #3,066: Release Me

How was your Groundhog Day?

No matter what the little critter said, mine was busy, busy, busy, and that will extend into today, my latest personal day of hell.

I lost my full-time job more than three years ago, yet I find that I am busier now than I ever was.

How can that be? I am supposed to be retired … or semi-retired.

But what with work and my other family responsibilities, the time just melts away each and every day.

Today, I have to take my son to work …

Then, I have to go to get my allergy shots, 20 miles there, and 20 miles back (this imbecility still irks me, but it appears to have no positive end result for me) …

Then I have to buy myself a new watch—yes, I still wear/use a wristwatch—as after a little bit more than three years, the thing finally gave out on me …

Then, I have to go and buy some supplies for my computer, including paper, an ink cartridge, and a new thumb drive (I keep the receipts to try to lessen my taxes, as it is all work related) …

Then I have to go pick up my son from work …

Then I have to go with him to pick up my mother at the local Jewish Community Center (JCC), which isn’t really local at all, but wherever it is, she takes a class geared to her mental state right now, so I am glad that she is going to this group, as it gives her something to do outside of the house, even though she usually doesn’t remember a thing what they talked about …

Then, after I try to fit into the day my work, and then lunch and then dinner, I have to take my son to his evening basketball scrimmage, which honestly is probably the most “relaxing” thing I will do all day.

I guess all of this is better than just sitting at home doing absolutely nothing … and today is Social Security pay day, so I have that to look forward to too.

But this is not the “retirement” that I envisioned when I was a younger person.

I thought retirement was when you sit around, put your feet up, and do only what you want to do, and if that meant doing absolutely nothing, then so be it.

When I thought that way, as a society, that is pretty much what retirement was; you could sit around and do nothing, you could take on a small job to keep you active; you could play golf or smoke your pipe if that is what you wanted to do.

After working full-time for 50 or 50 years, you earned it.

But even though retirees still deserve it, there is no way that they can do this anymore.

Not with inflation, not with a recession (I don’t care what the Feds say, we are in a recession brought on by record-setting inflation), and you just can’t live on Social Security, not with prices of everything going right through the roof.

I remember that when my daughter was young, we used to go to McDonald’s every time I saw her. She loved the place at the time, and it was a really good place to connect with her, since I did not see her every week.

I remember that I used to always see what I defined as “little old ladies” working in the fast food restaurant, and I mean, in every McDonald’s that we went to—from Queens through Nassau County and into Eastern Suffolk County—and I used to wonder, “Why are they killing themselves at this age?”

Now I know; they weren’t “killing themselves,” they were there out of necessity, a necessity that I did not understand until I lost my own job all those years later.

Very few of us can fully retire today.

Even if you retire on your own—something that I never got the chance to do—there are challenges at not bringing in a full-time salary anymore, and you have to kind of work around it and do the best that you can with whatever money you are bringing in.

For instance, what with my Social Security and my remote job, I literally get paid once a month.

In other jobs that I had over the decades, I got paid either every week or every other week.

Now, it is much more difficult to budget yourself when you get paid just one time a month, in particular on a day like today, where I know I will be spending more than $100 for the things I need that I listed above.

And when you get to the last week of the month, you almost count the minutes until you get paid again.

And remember, not only do I get paid once a month, but I get paid at about 50 percent of what I made as a full-timer … and if I was still working full-time, I might be making two-and-a-half to three times what I am making now, so it makes it all much more difficult to budget getting paid once a month and getting paid much, much less than I should be bringing in.

And knowing that the government continues to regulate the amount of pay I can get, since I had the audacity at retiring early … that really gets my goat.

It is not like I go down to my last dollar by the end of the month—far from it, I am happy to say—but it makes life a little more difficult when you begin to approach that level that kind of makes you a little queasy.

So that is where I stand today, a retiree—a semi-retiree really—who doesn’t feel anything like what I thought a retired person would feel like when I was in the midst of carving out my career.

I wish I could really retire at this point—I have been in this position for more than three years already, so if no one wants me as a full-timer anymore, I have accepted my plight to an extent—but it is not in the cards for me or for probably millions of other people in the same boat that I am in.

Even if you despise your job, cherish it for as long as you can, because you will find that when you retire, you will be lucky to get that proverbial gold watch for your efforts, and there is absolutely no gravy train on the other side of the rainbow when you hang it up.

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

Rant #3,065: Black Pearl

It’s Thursday, February 2, it’s Groundhog Day, and do you think the groundhog will see his shadow or not?

It doesn’t really matter to me, because I go by the calendar, and we have about two-and-a-half more months of winter.

Yesterday’s snow was a big nothing, but there was a measurable amount, so the 0.4 inches or so that we received, with no snow in the immediate future say the weathermen, will have to suffice, at least for now.

But again, we have about two-and-a-half months of winter still to come, so anything can happen.

One wipe of the brush, and my car was pretty much clean, and I went on my way—

Taking my son to work, filling up my car with gas--$3.33 a gallon was the best I could do—and going from one bank to another to do some money business, in preparation for Friday, when Social Security comes due.

I get paid once a month from my remote job and once a month from Social Security, so the beginning of the month is more than that for me, it is “P-A-Y-D-A-Y.”

I was determined to get all of this done—plus do the laundry, something I hate to do, as I explained yesterday—because I wanted to do something for myself, which can only mean go to my local record store and see what they had to offer.

I wasn’t going to spend any money there, because I had a gift certificate that my wife bought me for Hanukkah sitting unused, so I figured that if I could squeeze in just about 30 or 45 minutes during the morning, it would be the perfect day to go there.

And when I got there, the place was packed, and I do mean packed with people who probably thought the same way that I did … maybe they could squeeze in a little time to see what delights the store had out for sale.

And I guess in my own little way, I killed two birds with one stone, because not only did I get to the store and have time to see what they were offering, but in a sort of weird instance, I saluted Black History Month in a very, very minor way with my main purchase of the day—a record that I had previously seen at crazy prices, but at the store, it was reasonably priced, so I jumped at it, and it is now in my collection.

We all know who Muhammad Ali was.

He was probably the best boxer of my generation, or any generation, for that matter.

He was also a great media personality, one of the first athletes who really understood television and the power it could wield.

Along with Howard Cosell, the two were ubiquitous on television during the 1960s and 1970s and Ali’s way with words—“Fly like a butterfly, sting like a bee”—were legendary.

On the flip side, Ali was also a polarizing figure during his life, because he was a draft dodger during the Vietnam War era, and he became a Muslim late in the 1960s, one of the first professional athletes to take on and convert to this once—and still—mysterious faith.

Anyway, before he became a Muslim, he was Cassius Clay, and under that name, his popularity led him to many ventures inside and outside of the boxing ring.

Columbia Records, the largest and most popular record label at the time, decided that Clay was so popular that they would take a chance with him as a musical artist, and he recorded one album on the label, named after one of his famous lines, “I Am the Greatest.”

And while he may have been “The Greatest” in the boxing ring, on this 1964 record, he was in over his head, not quite as bad as Mrs. Miller was in mangling tunes, but this heavyweight was pretty lightweight when it came to singing and not “stinging.”

The public didn’t take much notice of the LP, but by his name alone, the album did get up to #61 on the Billboard Top Album Charts.

One single from the LP, “Stand By Me” backed with “I Am the Greatest,” managed to log a double-sided Bubbling Under placement, but all told, Clay’s off-the-mark singing told him right then and there that he should not give up his day job—and I think he got the point, because while his name was linked to some other recordings, he never again put out a solo singing LP.

And I also picked up another rarity at the record store that was in line with the Black History Month theme: “Stu Gilliam At the Basin Street West,” a comedy LP by a comic who was all over television in the late 1960s—a rarity for a black personality at the time—but who never quite made it to the big time.

I always liked this guy as an actor and as a comedian, and when he wasn’t on sitcoms like “The Monkees” doing his comedic acting thing, he was on “The Ed Sullivan Show” making people laugh.

This was quite a find, too, but I wonder how many people remember Gilliam?

He and Bill Cosby really opened the door for other black comics, including Richard Pryor and Flip Wilson, to make it into the living rooms of all Americans during that time nearly 60 years ago, of course preceded by other names, like Redd Foxx, Nipsey Russell, Moms Mobley and the like.

So rather unwittingly and without doing it purposely, I put my own personal stamp on Black History Month by purchasing these somewhat rare LPs …

Which I can listen to indoors, whether we never get another snowflake on the ground outdoors, or we are buried in the white stuff.

Let it show, let it snow, let it snow!

Rant #3,064: Point of No Return

Snow.

What’s that?

Until this morning, in my neck of the woods, we hadn’t had any measurable snow for well more than 300 days, setting a record for the longest period of not having any snow.

But today, that record has been broken, as the white stuff is on the ground and on the cars.

It isn’t much, but I guess you can say that it is enough.

Other places have been pummeled this year, including in other parts of the Northeast and in New York State, but prior to today, we had nothing.

Now we have something.

As I have said time and time again, as an adult, the snow is nothing but a nuisance to me.

It is not fun, and just leads to nothing good.

If this is the amount of snow that we are going to get, I can live with it, because after a bit of a cold snap here, it is supposed to be in the 50s next week, so if we have to get snow, this is the snow that we need to get.

A slight covering is so much better than a monsoon of the white stuff any day.

And if I can make a successful sequeway into another topic, then let me do it now …

I hate doing the laundry almost as much as I hate shoveling snow.

We do the laundry three days a week in my house, and it is truly amazing how many clothes we go through during that time period.

But the laundry must be done, and while my wife starts the laundry before she goes to work on Wednesday and Friday—we also do it on Sunday—it is left to me to fold everything and put it all away in the proper place.

(My wife’s stuff I just fold; she does not like anyone but herself putting away her clothes, so I just fold her stuff and leave it to her to put away.)

And then we have the extraneous stuff, like the towels, that have to be folded and put away, too, so over the course of one wash, we can have a massive amount of things to fold and to put away.

I am sure that some people out there find doing the wash very relaxing, but I am not one of those people.

I find it very pedantic, doing the same thing over and over and over again, and I find it boring, I guess, taking away time from other things that I prefer to do.

But I do it, because I cannot leave it for my wife to do when she gets home.

I didn’t do it too much when I was working full time; we both got home later in the day, so whoever got home first won the prize and did it; or at least one of us helped the other do it.

But now, at least on Wednesdays and Fridays, it is my responsibility, and I hate doing it.

(On Sunday, I usually do it good amount of it myself, but my wife and I basically do it together.)

I guess it is just not my thing, but it is something that needs to be done.

Like shoveling snow, it just isn’t my thing.

But in life, you cannot always do exactly what you want to do, so you do get stuck doing some things that you would rather not do …

And doing the laundry is one of those things.

Heck, I don’t like to shave, either, but unless I want to look like Man Mountain Mike, I have to shave a few times a week.

The same thing with the laundry; it has to be done.

Now that I have mentioned snow shoveling, doing the laundry, and shaving, what else don’t I like to do?

I guess you can add paying $4 a gallon for gas, an eventuality which is coming right up the pike during the next few weeks.

Now, the worst thing would be a day where I had to shovel snow, do the laundry, shave, and then have to fill up my gas tank with $4 a gallon gas.

Let’s hope that that particular nightmare does not happen.

Individually I can get though it; but to have it all happen on the same day …

I think not.